Abstract:
Compared to the dominant CMOS technology based on the charge information carrier, spintronics nanodevices rely on not only the electron’s charge but also its spin and is thus believed to be an alternative technology to overcome the hurdle of heat generating and leakage currents on the roadmap for 22nm CMOS logic and beyond. Based on the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) and spin momentum transfer effect - the magnetization orientation change will cause changes in conductance of the system or vice versa, spintronics devices have been widely used in today’s high capacity hard drives and magnetic recording industry. Recently, tremendous research and development efforts have been devoted to the following two most promising spintronics technologies - spin torque nano-oscillators (STNOs) for wireless communication and radar communication, and spin transfer torque RAM (STT-RAM) for data storage and computing.
In this first part of my talk, I will review spintronics technology development with particular focus on the Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) as well as the underlying fundamental physics. In the second part, I will introduce some of my recent work on the device modeling, electronic circuitry and architecture design of STT-RAM and STNO.