MESO-CMOS Hybrid Circuits With Time-Multiplexing Technique for Energy and Area-Efficient Computing in Memory

The magnetoelectric spin orbit (MESO), one of the emerging spin devices, represents a promising alternative to complementary metal-oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology. MESO provides dual functionality: each device can perform logic operations while acting as a nonvolatile memory device. MESO also offers advantages, such as an ultralow supply voltage of 100 mV and the potential to vertically integrate with CMOS, which promises significant energy and area efficiency. These features support MESO’s suitability for improving the energy efficiency and area efficiency of computing-in-memory (CIM) circuits. To harness the advantages of MESO in large-scale complex circuit systems, this article presents the development of a MESO-based standard cell library. This library is critical to realize automated design, as it allows the implementation of all the basic CMOS functions with MESO, thereby enabling MESO-CMOS hybrid design in large-scale complex circuits. This article also introduces a highly area-efficient time-multiplexing technique to optimize the complex function inside CIM. Specifically, the multiplier and multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) circuits using the MESO-CMOS hybrid time-multiplexing technique reduce the area by 85% and 81%, respectively, compared to CMOS implementations.