Computational reversibility is necessary for quantum computation and inspires the development of computing systems, in which information carriers are conserved as they flow through a circuit. While conservative logic provides an exciting vision for reversible computing with no energy dissipation, the large dimensions of information carriers in previous realizations detract from the system efficiency, and nanoscale conservative logic remains elusive. We therefore propose a nonvolatile reversible computing system in which the information carriers are magnetic skyrmions, topologically-stable magnetic whirls. These nanoscale quasiparticles interact with one another via the spin Hall and skyrmion Hall effects as they propagate through ferromagnetic nanowires structured to form cascaded conservative logic gates. These logic gates can be directly cascaded in large-scale systems that perform complex logic functions, with signal integrity provided by clocked synchronization structures. The feasibility of the proposed system is demonstrated through micromagnetic simulations of Boolean logic gates, a Fredkin gate, and a cascaded full adder. As skyrmions can be transported in a pipelined and nonvolatile manner at room temperature without the motion of any physical particles, this skyrmion logic system has the potential to deliver scalable high-speed low-power reversible Boolean and quantum computing.

• Received 21 May 2019
• Revised 8 October 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.12.064053