Abstract
The authors investigated the voltage control of a magnetic anisotropy field for perpendicular-magnetic tunnel junctions (p-MTJs) with low and high resistance-area (RA) products and for synthetic antiferromagnetic free and pinned layers. It was found that the sample with low RA products was more sensitive to the applied bias voltage than the sample with high RA products. The bias voltage effect was less pronounced for our sample with the synthetic antiferromagnetic layer for high RA products compared to the MTJs with single free and pinned layers.
Highlights
Perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions (p-MTJs) with large tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) and low resistance-area (RA) are the leading devices for the use in magnetic random access memories (MRAM) and spin logic applications
The p-MTJs possess lower spin induced magnetization switching current with higher thermal stability compared to MTJs with in-plane magnetic anisotropy, helping the former realize high-performance spin transfer torque (STT)-MRAM
We have reported p-MTJs with high TMR ratios exceeding 200% and low RA products of approximately 10 Ω·μm2.2 One of the technological problems in the application of these p-MTJs is to attain magnetization switching with further low power consumption
Summary
Perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions (p-MTJs) with large tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) and low resistance-area (RA) are the leading devices for the use in magnetic random access memories (MRAM) and spin logic applications. Voltage control of magnetic anisotropy (or electric-field-assisted magnetization switching) in thin ferromagnetic films is a good candidate for such low-power magnetization switching.[3,4,5,6,7,8] Many of the pioneer work in this field involved samples with the structure “first ferromagnetic layer (small coercivity) / insulator / second ferromagnetic layer (large coercivity)” with relatively large RA products (thicker insulator barriers). The voltage control of a magnetic anisotropy (a magnetizationswitching field) for p-MTJs for samples was synthesized using synthetic antiferromagnetic free and pinned layers with both low (thinner insulator) and high (thicker insulator) RA products. It was found that the effect of the electric field was considerably pronounced for the sample with low RA products (thinner insulator)
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