November 2010

Grandis has been awarded a new contract from DARPA to use their spintronics and magnetic-material expertise and develop non-volatile spin logic applications: which promises non-volatile, ultra-fast, radiation-hard and radically lower power consumption.

Development work will focus on integrating magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) materials capable of sensing very small magnetic fields with nano-magnets performing logic operations. The goal is to demonstrate non-volatile spin logic circuits operating at ultra-fast speeds of less than 1 nanosecond and ultra-low power consumption of less than 10 atto-Joules per operation. Such performance coupled with the inherent non-volatility of spin logic devices will enable not just significant reductions in the active power consumption of microprocessors but also the virtual elimination of standby power consumption.

Spin Transfer Technologies (STT) developed the first STT-MRAM device that uses STT's proprietary orthogonal spin transfer technology with a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) for memory state read-out. Using the MTJ element makes the device compatible with CMOS logic, and takes the orthogonal spin transfer technology a major step closer to commercialization.

The new device features deterministic switching, resulting in no incubation delays, 100% probability of switching with 500 picosecond pulses utilizing only 250 femtoJoules of energy, 100% magnetoresistance ratio, providing a highly sensitive readout of the magnetic state and bipolar switching behavior (switching upon either polarity of current pulse) potentially allowing simpler or fewer CMOS elements.

Here's a nice introduction-to-spintronics video from the Tanaka Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. They explain what is Spintronics, and how it can be applied to memory devices - including MRAM of course - and information processing with low power consumption: