Ultrafast heat-based logic in bio-inspired antiferromagnetic memory device
As electronic devices generate increasing amounts of waste heat, interest in using heat as a computational medium is growing. Material which we investigate, can use the heat in order to manipulate a stored information.
Inspired by how the human brain processes and stores information, Surýnek et al. demonstrated in their article published in the journal PhotoniX (https://doi.org/10.1186/s43074-025-00207-1) that heat-based operations can be as short as sub‑nanoseconds, making these bio-inspired devices compatible with the GHz frequencies of standard electronics. In this work, the response of an analog memory device made from thin film of the antiferromagnetic metal CuMnAs to bursts of heat pulses generated by the absorption of femtosecond laser pulses at room temperature was investigated. When the accumulated temperature in the device’s heat-based short-term memory (STM) exceeds a threshold, the output of in-memory logic operations is transferred within the same device to long-term memory (LTM), mimicking human memory, where repeated rehearsals are needed to transfer information from STM to LTM. The long-term memory relies on magnetoresistive switching from a reference low-resistive uniform magnetic state to high-resistive metastable nanofragmented magnetic states, where information is stored and electrically readable at macroscopic timescales. In the paper, also the rapid resetting of the long-term memory using heat pulses was demonstrated, completing a full write-read-reset cycle of this bio-inspired memory device entirely within the thermal domain.
