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Toshiba bases new MRAM device on HDD technology

“Perpendicular magnetic anisotropy MTJ” device opens the way to giga-bits capacity

Toshiba has announced a technology that it says will be key in building high density magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM), some researchers have long proposed as a future “universal” memory: fast, low power and non-volatile. Toshiba says it has fabricated a MRAM memory cell integrating the new technologies and verified its stable performance. MRAM can theoretically, the company says, achieve high level integration as the memory cell structure is relatively simple; in this advance, Toshiba applied and proved the spin transfer switching and perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) technologies in a magnetic tunnel junction, which is a key component in the memory cell. Spin transfer switching, Toshiba goes on to add, uses the properties of electron spin to invert magnetisation and writes data at very low power levels. It is a candidate among next-generation principles for new memory devices. PMA aligns magnetisation in the magnetic layer perpendicularly, either upward or downward in, rather than horizontally as in in-plane shape anisotropy layers. This technology is being increasingly used to enhance for storage capacity for high-density hard disc drives (HDDs); Toshiba has applied it to a semiconductor memory device.