Hprobe, a developer of testing equipment for magnetic devices, announced that it has teamed up with the IMEC research institute to jointly extend Hprobe's fast testing protocols for SOT-MRAM devices.
Hprobe has already begun to optimize its test flow for SOT-MRAM devices in order to bring the characterization and testing to an industrial level with the primary objective to reduce the testing time while maximizing yield.
In SOT-MRAM, or spin-orbit torque MRAM, the switching of the free magnetic layer is done by injecting an in-plane current in an adjacent SOT layer, unlike STT-MRAM where the current is injected perpendicularly into the magnetic tunnel junction and the read and write operation is performed through the same path. SOT-MRAM promises to be faster, denser and more efficient. In 2018 researchers from Imec fabricated SOT-MRAM devices on 300mm wafers using CMOS compatible processes, for the first time.