FASTER AND DENSER SPIN-TUNNELING RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY (STRAM)

The spin tunneling junctions Co/Al2O3/Ni80Fe20 provide an excellent me ans of storing a binary datum in the hard component (Go), and sensing its remanent state by switching the soft component (NiFe) in such a wa y that the magnetic state of the hard component remains unaltered. In this paper, it is clarified by a dynamic model that the switching is c aused by the incoherent rotation of the magnetization in the fine thin film pattern and the read access time for a micro-structured spin tun neling with area of 0.256 mu m x 0.256 mu m is 0.9 ns. In addition, a magnetic flux closure design was found to reduce the crosstalk by abou t a factor of five, compared with a conventional keeper-less design, w hich will be the most favored approach for achieving 10(9) bits/cm(2) areal density.