Advanced Nanoscale Magnetic Tunnel Junctions for Low Power Computing (Invited)

Nanoscale magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) has become a competitive candidate for low power computing, and many progresses were recently made. In this invited paper, we give an overview of our recent achievements in this topic. First, we present a MTJ with atom-thick tungsten spacer and bridging layer, which simultaneously shows the high perpendicular anisotropy, large tunnel magnetorisistance ratio, small resistance-area product, low write current density, and high robustness to annealing. Second, we propose a novel magnetic memory named NAND-SPIN addressing the drawbacks of the mainstream spin transfer torque and spin orbit torque based MTJs. Finally, we extend the MTJs to the neuromorphic application by creating skyrmions in the free layer during the magnetization switching.