The $1 billion EU Graphene Flagship project has announced a call out for new industrial partner to provide specific industrial and technology transfer capabilities to enhance the current consortium.
One of the work packages include a â¬200,000 project that seeks an MRAM tools developer to leverage solutions for graphene-spintronic stacks.
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.
Researchers from Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University (NTHU)managed to use a spin current to manipulate the exchange bias in Spin-Orbit Torque memory (SOT-MRAM). The researchers say that this has been a long-time challenge in the field.
To achieve this, the researchers added a platinum layer under the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic layers of the MRAM device. The researchers patented this technique before publishing their findings.
Researchers from Japan's Tohoku University developed a 128 Mb STT-MRAM device that features a write speed of 14 nm, the world's fastest STT-MRAM chip at a density over 100 Mb.
To achieve this high speed, the researchers developed MTJs that are integrated with CMOS, which also significantly reduces the power-consumption of the memory device.
EDA and semiconductor IP provider Silvaco announced today that Austria's second Christian Doppler Laboratory (CDL) was opened in collaboration with TU Wien's Institute for Microelectronics. The new CDL will develop new MRAM device simulation solutions.
TU Wien's Dr. Viktor Sverdlov, who heads the new CDL, says that "MRAM has the potential to deliver both more memory density and much lower power consumption extending memory beyond the current solutions".
Intel says it will present a new paper detailing its MRAM research at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in early December 2018. This is the first time we hear of any MRAM R&D at Intel which is great news, even if it just a research paper.
Intel has apparently successfully integrated embedded MRAM into the company's 22nm FinFET CMOS technology on full 300mm wafers. The magnetic tunnel junction-based memory cells are built from dual MgO magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) separated by a CoFeB-based layer in a 1 transistor-1 resistor (1T-1R) configuration in the interconnect stack. Intel has manufactured a 7.2Mbit array with reported data retention figures in excess of 10 years and write endurance of greater than 10^6 cycles.
Researchers from UC Berkeley and the Huazhong University of Science and Technology developed sub 10-nm STT MTJs that shows a thermal stability factor of more than 80.
The reserachers say that the highly efficient and dense MTJ could lead to higher efficiency and density STT-MRAM devices and spin-based computers.
SOT-MRAM (spin-orbit torque MRAM) has the potential to challenge STT-MRAM, as it is a faster, denser and much more efficient memory technology. Up until now, though, no suitable material that features both high electrical conductivity and a high spin hall effect was developed.
Now researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new thin film material made from bismuth-antimony (BiSb) that is a topological insulator that simultaneously achieves a colossal spin Hall effect and high electrical conductivity - which means it could be used to create SOT-devices.
Researchers from the University of Lorraine in France have discovered that multilayers films made of cobalt (Co) and nickel (Ni) hold great promise for STT-MRAM applications.
It was already shown before that Co/Ni multilayers have very good properties for spintronics applications, but up until now it wasn't clear if the films have a sufficiently large intrinsic spin polarization, which is necessary to create and maintain spin-polarized currents in spintronic devices. It was now shown that the films have a spin polarization of about 90% - which is similar to the best spintronic materials.
Researchers from Imec fabricated spin-orbit torque MRAM (SOT-MRAM) devices on 300mm wafers using CMOS compatible processes. The researchers say that these devices offer unlimited endurance, fast switching speeds and low power consumption.
Imec says that SOT-MRAM can overcome the limitation of spin-transfer torque in MRAM memories, but up until now it was only demonstrated in a lab. The core of the SOT-MRAM is a magnetic tunnel junction in which a thin dielectric layer is sandwiched between a magnetic fixed layer and a magnetic free layer. SOT-MRAM devices feature switching of the free magnetic layer 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.
