Electric Field Assisted Switching in Magnetic Random Access Memory

Electric field (EF)-assisted magnetization reversal is investigated in both top-pinned and bottom-pinned CoFeB/MgO/CoFeB magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs). EF modulation in coercivity (H_c) shows an increasing dependence with the thickness of the free layer (t_FL) at small t_FL values. This abnormal variation was attributed to possible Ta diffusion through the free layer to the interface with MgO barrier. It is found that the bidirectional switching is not achievable using unipolar EF only in our MTJ devices, which is due to small spin-transfer torque (STT) effect and switching uncertainty due to unipolar feature of EF-induced Hc modulation. A bipolar external magnetic field should be applied to realize EF-controlled magnetic random access memory (MRAM). For quasistatic magnetization reversal, the required field can be as low as 10 Oe when H_c is effectively modulated to nearly zero. Switching field as a function of switching time shows that the magnetization switching is dominated by thermal activation. Simulation results show that switching time is mainly determined by the damping constant and the EF efficiency. Different from STT-MRAM, a large damping constant is desired to achieve fast switching. Using a sweeping field method, we show that MTJs with a thermal stability factor as high as 58 can be reliably switched using an EF-modulated anisotropy scheme with a bipolar magnetic field as low as 10 Oe.