Ratchet superconducting vortex cellular automata

C. J. Olson Reichhardt^a,*, C. Reichhardt^a, M.B. Hastings^a, B. Janko^b
aCenter for Nonlinear Science and Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, T-12 MS B268, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
^bDepartment of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46617, USA

We present a ratchet effect which provides a general means of performing clocked logic operations on discrete particles, such as single flux quanta or electrons. The states are propagated through the device by the use of an applied ac drive. We numerically demonstrate that a complete logic architecture is realizable using this ratchet. We consider specific nanostructured superconducting geometries using superconducting materials under an applied magnetic field, with the positions of the individual vortices in samples acting as the logic states. These devices can be used as the building blocks for an alternative microelectronic architecture. We give an analytic formula for the switching times of the vortices for specific materials and geometries.
2004 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Ratchet effect; Josephson vortices; Cellular automata

The continuously decreasing size of microelectronic components based on standard complementary metal-oxide silicon (CMOS) components has followed Moore's empirical law, which predicts that the density of components per integrated circuit will double every 18 months, for over a quarter of a century [1]. This impressive progress, enabled by the relative ease with which CMOS devices can be scaled down to smaller sizes, will be halted within less than ten years [2] at the "100 nm wall." Manufacturing field-effect transistor (FET) devices smaller than 100 nm requires reducing the amorphous SiO₂ gate oxide layer thickness to below 2 nm. At this size, the gate oxide is only five silicon atoms thick, and electrons can begin to tunnel directly between the gate and the channel at a rate which increases exponentially with further decreases in thickness [4].

Intense efforts have been focused on developing solutions to the rapidly approaching barrier to further size reductions [3]. Improvements to the existing CMOS architecture, such as replacing the amorphous SiO₂ with a different dielectric material, are being explored but are encountering numerous difficulties [5-7]. This has led several groups to propose alternative architectures that do not face the same limitations as CMOS, such as single-electron devices [8], magnetic devices [9] or molecular switches [10,11].

A particularly interesting proposal based on single-electron logic is the quantum dot cellular automata (QCA) [12,13]. In this device, the positions of two localized electrons in a basic cell consisting of four quantum dots is used to define two logic states. Signals are propagated through a series of coupled cells, and different geometric arrangements of the cells can be used to construct various logic devices. The QCA, as proposed, can operate only at extremely low temperatures, and the processing speed is limited by the fact that the signal propagates by adiabatic changes of the state of a given cell.

The basic idea of using individual particles to store and transmit logic states has been extended to vortices in superconducting nanostructured arrays, and was demonstrated by storing binary information on a superconducting island with 2x2 plaquettes in Ref. [14]. A method for propagating logical information through pipelines to construct an alternative microelectronic architecture was proposed in [15], in analogy with the QCA architecture. Here, we briefly examine the building blocks of this superconducting vortex logic system.

In superconducting samples that have been nanofabricated with an array of pinning sites, an individual vortex will be captured by each pin at the matching field [16-26]. Here we consider pins in the form of blind holes, so that Abrikosov vortices can sit inside the pins at well-defined locations. If the pinning sites are not circular, but are instead elongated in the plane by a length (Fig. 1(a)), then vortices in adjacent dots will move to the top or bottom of each pinning site, as illustrated in Fig. 1(b). If vortex A in Fig. 1(b) is moved from the top of the pin to the bottom by, for example, an STM tip, then vortex B will move to the top of its pin after a transit time t_tr which can be written

where v(y)=f^./, the y velocity of vortex B at position y. The integration must start from a small offset because if the two vortices are at the same y location, they exert no force on each other in the y direction and will not move without thermal assistance. Putting in the approximation for the thin film interaction [27], f(r)=f₀' d/r, where f₀'=/(2), is the elementary flux quantum, is the permeability of free space, is the London penetration depth of the superconductor, and d is the thickness of the superconducting film, gives

Here time is measured in units of t₀=/f₀', distances are measured in units of d, and =B_c2/. For example, in the case of a Nb film of thickness 2000 with antidots of anisotropy = 3 = 135 nm, spacing between the dots of a = 3 = 135 nm, and dot width =0.24=10.8 nm, the transit time of t_tr=27.2t₀ corresponds to an actual time of 1.4 ns, indicating that the maximum operating frequency for this dot geometry is 696 MHz. Smaller or more closely spaced dots will operate at higher frequencies.

To create a logic device, it is necessary to propagate the signal by more than one well. Thus, we consider the addition of a third well, spaced a distance a' from the second well, as in Fig. 1(c). If the dot spacings are equal, a=a', then when the vortex in dot A is switched, the vortex in dot B will no longer be able to switch to the new logic state since the presence of the vortex in dot C creates a potential barrier at the center of dot B. Since vortex B has no kinetic energy, it is unable to overcome this barrier without the assistance of thermal activation. The barrier can also be lowered by taking a' > a.

We demonstrate the switching of the three-dot system by means of a two-dimensional numerical simulation with open boundary conditions. The equation of motion for a vortex i is
f_i=v_i= f_i^vv+f_i^p+f_i^T
where f_i^T is a Langevin force due to the temperature. The pinning force f_i^p is implemented using an ordinary parabolic trap that has been split in half and elongated in the y direction. In the central elongated portion of the pin, there is no y-direction confining force. The pin strength is chosen strong enough that each vortex remains confined within its pin at all times. The vortex-vortex interaction is taken to be that of vortices in a thin film, f^vv(r)=f₀' d/r. Fig. 2 shows the distribution of switching times P(t_s) for a system with f_T=1.2f₀', a=0.5, a'=0.68, and =2.48, obtained from 200 runs with different random temperature seeds. The dotted line in Fig. 2(a) indicates that the switching time of vortex B, P(t_s^(B)), is exponentially distributed, which is consistent with the thermally activated nature of the switching. The distribution of switching times for the third vortex C, P(t_s^(C)), plotted in Fig. 2(b), is clearly broader and more heavily weighted toward later times. P(t_s^(C)) is simply the product of two exponential distributions, as can be seen from the plot in Fig. 2(c), where the distribution of switching time for vortex C measured from the time when vortex B switched, P(t_s^(C)-t_s^(B)), is also exponentially distributed.

If additional wells are added, the spacing between wells n and n+1 must always exceed the spacing between wells n and n-1. This places a practical limitation on the total length of a device that could be constructed, since the vortices will thermally decouple once the well spacing becomes too large. In addition, the distribution of switching times for the final well will become increasingly broad and approach a Gaussian as the number of wells is increased. Thus strict clocking of the signal cannot be achieved with this approach.

The limitations listed above can be overcome by allowing the well shapes to vary, and by introducing a ratchet mechanism which operates by altering the spacing between neighboring vortices without requiring the wells to be placed ever further apart as the number of wells is increased [15]. A well geometry which can be used for clocked logic operations is illustrated in Fig. 3. The pattern consists of a series of three alternating wells, A, B, and C. Well A is identical to the wells considered in the first portion of this paper: it is narrow, and does not allow significant vortex motion in the x direction. Wells B and C are both wider, but are biased in opposite directions. A vortex in well B will preferentially move to the left side of the well, whereas a vortex in well B will preferentially move to the right side of the well. The potential required to achieve this effect is illustrated as U(x) in Fig. 3. With this well geometry, the spacing between the vortices is not constant. As shown in Fig. 3(a), in the absence of any driving currents, the vortices in wells A and B are closer together (a spacing of "a"), while the vortices in wells B and C are further apart (a spacing of "a'"). The vortices in wells C and A are also close together (spacing a). As a result, if the vortex in well A is switched, as illustrated in Fig. 3(a), the vortex in well B will be able to flip to the new state without being trapped by a potential barrier at the center of the well, as described above for equally shaped wells with varying spacing. The addition of a suitable potential U(y)y² can remove this barrier completely and allow the vortex to switch without thermal activation.

Once the signal has moved over by one well from A to B, it stops. In order to propagate it further, we must adjust the spacing between the vortices. We achieve this by applying a three-stage ac external current J(t). The order of the three stages is J=0, J=-J, and J=+J. Here J is chosen large enough to overcome the bias of wells B and C and shift the vortex to the opposite side of the well, but not large enough to depin the vortices. At J=0, the spacing between the vortices in wells B and C is the far spacing a'. When we apply J=-J, as shown in Fig. 3(b), the vortex in well C is shifted from the right side of the well to the left side. As a result, vortices B and C are spaced by a distance a, while vortices C and A are spaced by the larger distance a'. Thus, vortex C is now able to flip to the new logic state. In the third stage of the ratchet, J=+J, the vortices in wells B and C shift to the right side of the wells, so that the far spacing a' is now between the vortex in the rightmost well A and the vortex in well B to the right of this well, not illustrated in the figure. At the same time vortices C and A are now at the close spacing a, coupling them, and allowing the vortex in the rightmost well A to flip to the new state. As the cycle repeats, the signal continues to propagate to the right.

The signal is prevented from moving backward due to the fact that there are three stages of the ac drive and three shapes of the well. This breaks the left-right symmetry of the system. For example, in Fig. 3(b), only the vortex in well C can flip. The vortex in well B is not able to flip back to its previous state due to the presence of vortex A at a close spacing a from vortex B, which inhibits the flip. The signal follows the location of the far spacing a' as this spacing is propagated through the system.

To illustrate that fully clocked signal propagation is possible using the well geometry described above, we perform a simulation of a logic pipeline composed of 144 wells with shapes A, B, and C. The length of the repeat pattern (3 wells) is 5, the diameter of the thin well A is 0.48, and the diameter of the wide wells B and C is 1. The close spacing a=1.5 while the far spacing a'=2. This does not represent an optimal ratio of a/a', which is equal to 2, but instead was chosen to include a realistic finite separation between the dots. The length of the wells in the transverse direction, not counting the confining ends, is 1.2. Each well also includes an additional confining potential U(y)y² which removes the remaining barrier to vortex motion. As shown in Fig. 4, a signal introduced at one end of the pipeline propagates perfectly through the wells, and required 10000 molecular dynamics steps to move over by three wells. In YBCO, with =156 nm, this would correspond to a frequency of = 160.2 MHz. Higher frequencies can be obtained by decreasing the sizes of the wells, or equivalently by using a material with smaller . The ratchet is robust against thermal fluctuations, and strict clocking can be maintained if the energy scales of the ratchet potential exceeds the thermal energy scale. An example of thermal activation combined with the ratchet effect is given in Ref. [15].

The dissipation of the device arising from the motion of the vortices during each stage of the ac drive is negligible, of order 10^-17 J. This is orders of magnitude smaller than comparable dissipation in CMOS structures. These small dissipation energies are similar to those for magnetic QCA devices [9].

The direction of the signal propagation can be reversed simply by reversing the stages of the ac drive. Additionally, it is possible to reverse the signal propagation for the same ac drive used above by altering the well shapes slightly. If well A is replaced with a wider well that has a V-shaped U(x), such that the vortex sits at the center of the well for J=0 and shifts to either side of the well during the other two segments of the ac cycle, then the far spacing a' will propagate to the left instead of to the right. This would allow two pipelines operating in opposite directions to be driven by the same clocking current.

Logic gates can be created from the ratchet geometry by coupling more than one pipeline together vertically, and introducing specific modulations in the well spacing to control the coupling. For example, a fanout, which splits one logic pipeline into two, is illustrated in Fig. 5(a). The well spacing at the beginning of the fanout is increased slightly in order to enable the vortex in well C immediately to the left of the fanout to respond to its left neighbor in well B rather than to its two right neighbors in wells A. A NAND gate is illustrated in Fig. 5(b). There is a similar increased spacing between wells at the point where the two pipelines couple to produce a single signal. A slight upward bias is applied to the vortices in the center A and B cells (which serve as the gating cells), in order to give the system a preferred state if the inputs are in an opposite state, thus producing the NAND logic [28]. Very complex designs for gate arrays can be constructed using a large number of neighboring pipelines with spacing that is varied in selected places.

The basic ratchet naturally functions as an inverter. The gate shown in Fig. 5(b) can be used as a NAND or NOR gate, or, with an additional inverter, an AND or OR gate. Given these gates, a full logic family is available, and an XOR gate can be constructed from the NOT and AND gates. For example, to construct an XOR gate, one might try However, this series of logic operations requires a wire-crossing, as shown in Fig. 6. While it may be possible to implement a wire-crossing with a bi-layer material, there is an alternate means of constructing the XOR gate without crossing any wires. This is shown in Fig. 7. We use From this XOR gate, one can construct a series of gates that functions as a wire-crossing, as shown in Fig. 8, where we use and

The ratchet effect illustrated here for a superconducting vortex system can be generalized to other systems in which the position of individual particles is used to represent logic states. For example, for electron charges in a quantum dot, such as in the QCA architecture, the maximum operating frequency would be set by the level spacing of the dot, and would be higher than the frequencies achieved here. Faster operating speeds can also be obtained by using Josephson vortices, which have no normal core. Our system may also be realizable for ions in dissipative optical light arrays with damped ion motion where the potentials can be tailored by adjusting the optical landscape [29]. In addition, a variation of this system could be constructed using charged colloidal particles in optical trap arrays [30], where the colloids can be driven with an electric field, an ac fluid flow, or by oscillating the trap.

In summary, we have proposed a ratchet mechanism to produce clocked logic operations for discrete particles such as vortices in nanostructured superconductors by using an applied ac drive combined with three repeating trap shapes. We have shown using numerical simulations that this ratchet effect can overcome the limitations of using equally shaped wells operated by thermal activation, where clocking could not be achieved. Our results should be generalizable for other systems such as single electrons in quantum dots, Josephson vortices, and ions in optical traps.

Acknowledgments

References

1. R.R. Schaller, IEEE Spectrum 34 (1997) 53.
2. International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (2001).
3. M. Schulz, Nature 399 (1999) 729.
4. D.A. Muller, T. Sorsch, S. Moccio, F.H. Baumann, K. Evans-Lutterodt, and G. Timp, Nature 399 (1999) 758.
5. H.S. Momose, M. Ono, T. Yoshitomi, T. Ohguro, S. Nakamura, M. Saito, and H. Iwai, IEEE Trans. Elect. Dev. 43 (1996) 1233.
6. B. Cheng, M. Cao, R. Rao, A. Inani, P.V. Voorde, W.M. Greene, J.M.C. Stork, Z. Yu, P.M. Zeitzoff, and J.C.S. Woo, IEEE Trans. Elect. Dev. 46 (1999) 1537.
7. K. Cho, Comp. Mater. Sci. 23 (2002) 43.
8. D. Goldhaber-Gordon, M.S. Montemerlo, J.C. Love, G.J. Opiteck, and J.C. Ellenbogen, Proc. IEEE 85 (1997) 521.
9. R.P. Cowburn and M.E. Welland, Science 287 (2000) 1466.
10. M. Asakawa, M. Higuchi, G. Mattersteig, T. Nakamura, A.R. Pease, F.M. Raymo, T. Shimizu, and J.F. Stoddart, Adv. Mater. 12 (2000) 1099.
11. F.M. Raymo, Adv. Mater. 14 (2002) 401.
12. C.S. Lent, P.D. Tougaw, W. Porod, and G.H. Bernstein, Nanotechnology 4 (1993) 49.
13. I. Amlani, A.O. Orlov, G. Toth, G.H. Bernstein, C.S. Lent, and G.L. Snider, Science 284 (1999) 289.
14. T. Puig, E. Rosseel, M. Baert, M.J. Van Bael, V.V. Moshchalkov, and Y. Bruynseraede, Appl. Phys. Lett. 70 (1997) 3155.
15. M.B. Hastings, C.J. Olson Reichhardt, and C. Reichhardt, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90 (2003) 247004.
16. M. Baert, V.V. Metlushko, R. Jonckheere, V.V. Moshchalkov, and Y. Bruynseraede, Phys. Rev. Lett. 74 (1995) 3269.
17. L. Van Look et al., Phys. Rev. B 60 (1999) R6998.
18. V. Metlushko et al., Phys. Rev. B 60 (1999) R12585.
19. K. Harada, O. Kamimura, H. Kasai, F. Matsuda, A. Tonomura, and V.V. Moshchalkov, Science 274 (1996) 1167.
20. S.B. Field, S.S. James, J. Barentine, V. Metlushko, G. Crabtree, H. Shtrikman, B. Ilic, and S.R.J. Brueck, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 067003.
21. J.I. Martin, M. Velez, J. Nogues, and I.K. Schuller, Phys. Rev. Lett. 79 (1997) 1929.
22. D.J. Morgan and J.B. Ketterson, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80 (1998) 3614.
23. J.I. Martin, M. Velez, A. Hoffmann, I.K. Schuller, and J.L. Vicent, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83 (1999) 1022.
24. C. Reichhardt, C.J. Olson, and F. Nori, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 (1997) 2648.
25. C. Reichhardt and N. Gronbech-Jensen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 (2000) 2372.
26. C. Reichhardt, G.T. Zimanyi, R.T. Scalettar, A. Hoffmann, and I.K. Schuller, Phys. Rev. B 64 (2001) 052503.
27. J.R. Clem, Phys. Rev. B 43 (1991) 7837.
28. Movies of some of these simulations are available online at http://www.t12.lanl.gov/home/olson/VCA.html.
29. M.T. DePue, C. McCormick, S.L. Winoto, S. Oliver, and D.S. Weiss, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82 (1999) 2262.
30. M. Brunner and C. Bechinger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 248302.

Back to Home CJOR
Back to Home CR
Last Modified: 8/18/04