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Spintronic scaling enabled by iron-palladium

Spintronic scaling enabled by iron-palladium

Technology News |
By Peter Clarke



Researchers from the University of Minnesota, together with a team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have developed a material and process to allow more efficient spintronic devices that can scale below 5nm.

The material, iron-palladium, provides an alternative to the mainstream CoFeB/MgO and the researchers showed it could be thin films on Si/SiO2 wafers. The work is published in a paper in Advanced Functional Materials.

The researchers state that cobalt-iron-boron, has reached a limit in scalability but they have been able to show that iron palladium, which requires less energy and has the potential for higher density data storage, can be scaled down to much smaller sizes.

“We believe we’ve found a material and a device that will allow the semiconducting industry to move forward with more opportunities in spintronics that weren’t there before for memory and computing applications,” said Jian-Ping Wang, senior author of the paper and professor in the College of Science and Engineering.

The team was able to grow the material in layers thinner than 5nm on top of a conventional 200mm-diameter silicon wafer. The wafer has an amorphous silicon-dioxide surface layer and on this the team laid down an MgO(001) seed layer. Chromium and platinum buffering was used to support the FePd. Multilayer systems were studied by the insertion of an iridium layer between twin FePd layers.

The successful characterization of FePd materials sputtered on to conventional silicon wafers at nanometer-scale thicknesses makes the possibility of scalable spintronics more practical, the authors concluded.

Related links and articles:

Sputtered L10-FePd and its Synthetic Antiferromagnet on Si/SiO2 Wafers for Scalable Spintronics

https://twin-cities.umn.edu/

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