Technical / Research

Researchers from the School of Engineering at Stanford University discovered that a metallic compound called manganese palladium three MnPd3 is a promising material to build SOT-MRAM memory devices. 

The researchers say that the new material enables a breakthrough in SOT-MRAM device performance, as it is the first material that generates spin in the z-direction, rather than the y-direction as in most materials, which is a property needed in high-performance SOT-MRAM. In fact MnPd3 is able to generate spins in any orientation because its internal structure lacks the kind of crystal symmetry that would force all of the electrons into a particular orientation.

Hprobe, a developer of testing equipment for magnetic devices, announced a new addition to its product line, the RF Pulse Module. The company says that this is the commercially available testing system to both collect statistics of error rate of the memory unit cell and take a deep look into switching dynamics of resistive memories.

Hprobe's IBEX system

Hprobe says that the RF Pulse Module is two orders of magnitude faster than existing devices and can help increase manufacturing yields. Hprobe has already begun shipping to tier-1 companies and major research institutes around the world.

A research team from Northwestern Engineering, led by Prof. Pedram Khalili developed highly efficiency nanoscale perpendicular MRAM (pMTJ) devices that use sub-volt switching. The researcher say that this new technology can allow scaling MRAM to very high densities.

The new devices are referred to as voltage-controlled MRAM (VCM), that does not rely on current like regular MRAM devices. Most VCM devices need high switching voltage (at least 2 volts), but by using a new material structure with significantly higher sensitivity of the magnetic properties to voltage, the researchers were able to operate at less than one volt.

Researchers from Samsung will soon present at IEDM 2022 a new research paper that will discuss the company's latest achievements in scaling down its MRAM technology to the company's 14nm FinFET logic process.

The Samsung researchers produced a stand-alone memory with a write energy requirement of 25 pJ per bit and active power requirements of 14 mW for reading and 27 mW for writing at a 54Mbyte per second data rate. The cycling  is 10^14 cycles and when scaled to a 16Mbit device, a chip would occupy 30 square millimeters.

Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) announced two new MRAM collaborations. The first one is with Taiwan's TSMC, for the development of SOT-MRAM array chips. The second collaboration is with National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) to develop magnetic memory technology that can perform across a wide operating temperature range of nearly 400 degrees Celsius.

Together with TSMC, ITRI is developing low-voltage and current SOT-MRAM, that features high write efficiecny and low write voltage. ITRI says that its SOT-MRAM achieves a writing speed of 0.4 nanoseconds and a high endurance of 7 trillion reads and writes. The memory also offers a data storage lifespan of over 10 years.

Renesas announced that it has developed 22-nm embedded STT-MRAM circuit technologies. Renesas developed a test 32-megabit (Mbit) chip with an embedded MRAM memory cell array that achieves 5.9-nanosecond (ns) random read access at a maximum junction temperature of 150°C, and a write throughput of 5.8-megabyte-per-second (MB/s).

To achieve this performance, Renesas developed two technologies. The first is a fast read technology employing high-precision sense amplifier circuit, utilizing capacitive coupling. The second is a fast write technology, with simultaneous write bit number optimization and shortened mode transition time.

Researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the Fert Beijing Institute of Beihang University have experimentally demonstrated a fully-functional picosecond opto-MRAM building block device, by integrating ultrafast photonics with spintronics.

The researchers used a femtosecond (fs) laser, which is the fastest stimuli commercially that enabled the device to be extremely fast - and also a thousand times more energy efficient compared to standard MRAM devices. The device is based on the femtosecond laser-induced all-optical switching (AOS) scheme in synthetic ferrimagnetic multilayers that was discovered by TU/e in 2017, integrating it with MRAM bit

Taiwan-based Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) announced an agreement with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to co-develop Voltage-Control MRAM (VC-MRAM) technologies.

ITRI says that VC-MRAM is a type of SOT-MRAM that offers improved performance - 50% higher writing speed and 75% less energy consumption. VC-MRAM is said to be ideal for AIoT and automotive industry applications. The partnership is expected to strengthen the link between both parties and accelerate the R&D and industrialization of new memory technologies.

Researchers from National Taiwan University in collaboration with TSMC developed a new SOT-MRAM device structure, that features sizable orbital currents. This research promises a pathway for enhancing SOT-MRAM performance by harnessing both the conventional spin currents and the emergent orbital currents.

The new device is based on 3d light transition metals (such as V and Cr) that are incorporated into the classical spin Hall metal Pt. The Pt-Cr alloy enhances the charge-to-spin conversion efficiency which can realize high spin-orbital Hall conductivity, beyond the conventional spin Hall limit.

Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology developed an ultrahigh-efficiency SOT magnetization switching in fully sputtered BiSb–(Co/Pt) multilayers with large perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA).

The new device offers a large spin Hall angle and high electrical conductivity, thus satisfying all the three requirements for SOT-MRAM implementation. The researchers managed to achieve robust SOT magnetization at a low current density despite the large PMA field.