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In this talk, we first report the roadmap and development of advanced perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions based on low-damping magnetic materials with crystalline anisotropy that can be scaled down to sub-3-nm diameter with 10 years’ retention time 1. Then, we will present the perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions (p-MTJs) switched utilizing bipolar electric fields. Traditional voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy only linearly lowers the energy barrier of ferromagnetic layer via electric field effect and efficiently switches p-MTJs only with a unipolar behavior. Here we propose and demonstrate a bipolar electric field effect switching of 100-nm p-MTJs through voltage-controlled exchange coupling (VCEC) 2. The switching current density, ~1.1×105 A/cm2, is one order of magnitude lower than that of the best-reported spin-transfer torque devices. Theoretical results suggest that electric field induces a ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic exchange coupling transition and generates a field-like interlayer exchange coupling torque, which cause the bidirectional magnetization switching. We will further report our recent results to switch the p-MTJs using the interplay of SOT and VCEC, which lowers the VCEC switching current density to ~5×103 A/cm23. These results could eliminate the major obstacle in the development of spin memory devices beyond their embedded applications. This technology can be used directly for the future spin-orbit-torque (SOT) MRAM 3 and spin logic devices 4.
References
1 D. Zhang, et al, Phys. Rev. Applied, (2018) vol. 9, 044028
2 D. Zhang, et al, Nano Letters (2022), doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c03395
3 B. Zink, et al, Advanced Electronic Materials, (2022), DOI: 10.1002/aelm.202200382
4 M. Mankalale, et al, IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits, 3 (2017) 27-36; 10.1109/JXCDC.2017.2690629

