Ayan Kumar Biswas, PhD

I have earned my Ph.D. from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2016. My area of research belongs to an emerging field of research called hybrid spintronics and straintronics towards ultralow power computing with multiferroic nanomagnets. Memory and logic devices if implemented with nanomagnets, offer low power dissipation - usually orders of magnitude less than CMOS with an additional feature called non-volatility. Non-volatility in nanomagnetic devices rejects the requirement of standby power to store bits, unlike CMOS where without standby power bits are lost forever. There are numerous ways to utilize a nanomagnet as a binary switch for Boolean computation. My work concentrates on the strain based approach of switching nanomagnets. The name straintronics thereby evolved from the term 'strain' being involved. Through simulations, we found that straintronic technology dissipates a minuscule amount of energy in a switching event, outperforming its other spintronic competitors in terms of energy dissipation. We proposed several energy-efficient memory and logic schemes towards the development of straintronic technology. A pure straintronic memory has recently been demonstrated experimentally.