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Recent Trends in Spintronics devices

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 Recent Trends in Spintronics Devices
Syed Wajeeh Uddin Quadri, Muhammad Naveed, Aqeel-ur-Rehman
Hamdard Institute of Engineering and Technology,
Faculty of Engineering Sciences & Technology, Hamdard University
Sharae Madinat-ul-Hikmah, Karachi
uacwajeeh@live.com
naveed0912@hotmail.com
aqeel.rehman@hamdard.edu
Abstract - Spintronics is a new technology in electronics in
which we alter the spin of electrons in addition to its charge for
device functionality. A lot of work is being done and it’s a rapidly
emerging field of technology that will have a great impact on
electronics. The main areas in which this field can be utilized are
information computing, storage, and quantum information. The
main objective of this paper is to present an introduction to the
Spintronics technology including the recent advantages and
utilization like MRAM, and Quantum computer. The primary
focus is on the recent trends in Spintronics, its devices, working
principle of Spintronics, its advantages and disadvantages.
Index Terms - Spintronics, Spin-injection, Magneto logic
gates, Automation Visual Inspection, Spin Field Effect
Transistor.
I. INTRODUCTION
Spintronics is a name for such devices which uses the
spin of electrons instead of charge for information processing.
By combining microelectronics with spin dependent effects
that arise from the interaction between spin of the carrier and
magnetic properties of the material, a new generation of
efficient devices can be manufactured. Lower power
consumption, Higher speed are the motivation for Spintronics
devices. The electrons spin can be “spin up” or “Spin down”
relative to a reference magnetic field [4]. One advantage of
spin over charge is that it can be easily manipulated by
external magnetic field. This property opens the possibility of
creating devices that are smaller, efficient and powerful for
certain types of computation. Another promising property of
Spintronics technology is to preserve coherence for relatively
long times in electronic materials. A typical electron
remembers its initial position for a nanosecond. This time is
longer than electron momentum relaxation. The performance
of the Spintronic device will depend upon the spin lifetime i.e.
the longer the spin lifetime, the better and more reliable will
be the Spintronic device [11]. Some devices are already in use
in the industry like GMR (Giant Magneto-resistance) which
consists of alternating layers of ferromagnetic & non-
magnetic metal layers used as a memory storage cell and read
heads. GMR will be discussed in detail later in this paper.
There are two different approaches in designing and
manufacturing. First is to improve the GMR technology by
making new materials with larger spin polarization of
electrons or making some improvements for better spin
filtering. Second is to find ways for the generation and
utilization of spin polarized currents. The spin in electrons
contains some important properties which need to be
discussed for e.g. all the spin of electrons can remain in one
direction which is called “coherence”. When the spin is
created the time for which it remains unchanged is called
“Relaxation Time”. The movement of spin like the flow of
charge is also able to carry information [1].
A. Working principle of Spintronic devices
The operation of Sprintronics devices is based upon the
facts that any two neighboring electron cells have opposite
direction and only neighboring cells can interact with each
other. If two neighboring electron in a row has upward
direction will be taken as Logic „1‟ & if its downward
oriented then it will be taken as Logic „0‟. But if one neighbor
is upward and the other is downward then the electron cell
means a quantum dot. This does not happen as the DC
magnetic field applied is very weak and causes a Zeeman
splitting between „up‟ and „down‟ position. Let us consider
that the weak DC magnetic field applied favors upward
orientation then if one neighbor of a cell is upward and the
other one is downward then the cell would be upward
oriented. According to above mentioned properties the cell
would be downward oriented if both the cells have same
direction otherwise the cell will be upward oriented [4].
B. Difficulties & Issues
Some issues with Sprintronics devices are discussed here
[1, 11]:
 In magnetic tunnel junction devices future high
density MRAM will require at least 50 ohm
resistance. The spread of junction must be uniform
which requires very high precision
 Spin injection into a semiconductor has already been
demonstrated but it is still to be proven that the
materials and the concept are suitable for room
temperature and on a large scale
 Spintronics devices uses magnetic materials like
nickel, iron, cobalt with alloys not commonly used
with semiconductors therefore it is difficulty in
patterning and in integrating the magnetic material
into the silicon process
 II. SPINTRONICS DEVICES
A. Giant Magneto-Resistance (GMR)
When electron-spin effects occur in very thin multi layers
of magnetic material in the presence of magnetic field, huge
changes in resistances occurs. It consists of three layer
sandwich of metal such as nickel with a non magnetic metal
such as silver. When current passes through the layers, those
oriented to the same direction as the electron spins passes
through quite easily while those which are oppositely oriented
are scattered. Now it acts as a spin filter by letting through
more electrons when spin orientation are in the same direction
and fewer electrons when they are opposite in direction. In
this way electrical resistance can be changed. One of the
application of GMR is read heads used in the Hard drives.
Data is stored through magnetism but we need to access the
data. For this purpose read heads are used. Magneto resistive
devices can sense the changes in the magnetic field to a small
extent, which is applicable to the current devices. But in future
when we reduce the size and increase the density, our sensor
also needs to be small and maintain very high sensitivity.
GMR is very useful in this purpose. The read heads consisting
of GMR materials would be much stronger and able to sense
small changes in magnetic field due to which Hard Drive
capacity will increase from 1 to 20 gigabits [1, 7].
1) PCB Defect Detection Using GMR:
Printed circuit boards are widely used in almost all the
electronic devices in the world. PCB should be cleared with
all defects for the reliability of our final product. There are
chemical and mechanical processes involved in the making of
PCB which can damage our intended design. Commercially
available testing methods for PCB involve Automatic Visual
Inspection (AVI) which takes image of the testing PCB and
match it with the standard PCB. The disadvantage of this
method is that it cannot differentiate the actual defects such as
pen marks. There is a High-speed method based on Eddy
Current Testing (ECT) used to detect conductive or
ferromagnetic material which alters the magnetic field which
is generated by the current of the ECT probe. Eddy current
testing is very popular due its low cost, non contacting nature,
portability. Eddy current detection sensors are based on AMR
or GMR sensors due to their low noise, broad range of
frequencies, inexpensive but GMR sensors have greater output,
they have better directional property and are able to work in
fields well above the range of AMR. An ECT probe can be
used to detect PCB defects. It consists of coil & spin valve
GMR sensor. The signal capturing process is time consuming
however this can be overcome by using Analogue to Digital
convertor (ADC) using Fourier Transform. The output from
the SV-GMR is captured through ADC card which is
connected to the PC. Fourier Transform is applied to the
signal. Same test area is scanned with the similar setup, using
the lock-in amplifier instead of the ADC card. The method of
using the ADC card is fast as compared to the lock-in
amplifier hence it is the better option for PCB defect detection
[8].
2) GMR in Magnetic Recording:
When GMR was newly discovered, scientists wondered if
they could be used for reading back information stored in the
Hard Drives. GMR spin valve sensors were the first
widespread commercial use of Sprintronics. The spin valve
magnetic structure is used in read back sensors used in HDD
today. Most of the Sprintronics devices consist of Spin valve.
Spin Valve consists of two ferro magnetic layers separated by
a conduction spacer layer where one of the ferromagnetic
layers is exchange coupled to an anti-ferromagnet. One of the
advantages of using spin valve is that it is flexible. The spin
valve can be modified by adding layers or changing layer
materials. To achieve high density recording separate read and
write transducers are independently optimized [9].
3) Current Sensor Based on GMR:
Giant magneto-resistance which has already
revolutionized the fields of data storage can also be used to
make current sensors. The application of this current sensor is
in a smart grid. The GMR current sensor is cost effective and
performs well for steady state and transient state monitoring.
A magnetic field is created around a wire carrying current.
The current flowing through the wire can be measured by the
GMR sensor which is placed closed to it. The wire in which
the current is to be measured is wrapped around a magnetic
ring. GMR chip is placed between the gaps. In order to
convert the magnetic signal into voltage signal, a wheat stone
bridge is used. Current sensors are important for the purpose
of protection and control. The GMR chip can sense high
frequency magnetic field up to 1 MHz. There are a lot of
current which needs to be measured in a smart grid. The
magnitude of current can vary from 1 μA to 200 kA and
frequency can vary from DC to 100 MHz. The current sensors
mainly include Current transformers (CTs), Rogowski coils,
shunts, fiber-optic current transformer (FOCTs), flux gate
sensors, Hall Effect sensors and GMR effect sensors. GMR
sensors are the most promising in current measurement due to
its high linearity, high sensitivity, and small volume, low cost.
GMR sensors can also be used to monitor large scale
distributed systems and to get real-time information for each
grid [10].
B. Magneto-Resistive Random Access Memory (MRAM)
Nowadays computer uses SRAM and DRAM which
require electricity to store information. We need to constantly
give capacitors the power because the charge is constantly
leaking out. Most Random Access memories are volatile
memories i.e. they lose information when electricity is cut off,
but MRAM is a non-volatile memory. MRAM is based on
magnetic tunnel junctions which is a three layer device have
thin insulting layer between two ferro-magnets. Small number
of electrons jumps through the barrier. The tunnelling current
is obstructed when two ferromagnetic layers have opposite
orientation and is allowed when the orientation are same. So,
MRAM needs electricity to change the direction but not to
hold them. When big polarity points in one direction it holds
„1‟ and when polarity is opposite it holds „0‟ [7]. MRAM
stores information by magnetism not by electric charge. That
is why MRAM is a non-volatile memory. MRAMs are smaller,
cost effective and 100 times faster than Electrically Erasable
Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROM) and Flash
Memory. MRAMs will be more reliable in higher temperature,
high level radiations and interferences [1]. As our devices
shrink in size, more questions are rising towards the CMOS
technology due to its limited scalability and power dissipation.
Due to Sprintronics some of these issues can be overcome.
The Magnetic tunnel junctions can be used for efficient
logical operations. If we compare MRAM with other logic
gates for e.g. NAND devices have large amount of storage and
are much cheaper then MRAM, but MRAMs are much faster
and costly. We can design a better controller by adding the
capabilities of both NAND flash memory and MRAM. This
allows the controller to become more optimized and is able to
store critical data and by using NAND flash memory to store
non-critical data. MRAM does not need to erase the previous
data prior to being written with the new data. MRAM could
replace the current storage devices in the near future [12].
1) Magneto-Logic Gates
A magneto logic gate consists of 5 ferromagnetic
electrodes on top of a nonmagnetic layer. The Ferro magnetic
region is non volatile which will be used for information
storage. An elongated Permalloy layer (Py) is the free
magnetic layer into which the information is encoded. Out of
the 5 electrodes, the middle one (M) is used for read out and
the remaining 4 are logic operands whose values are based on
the direction on magnetism. The output state usin Boolean
expression is as follows [2]:
(A XOR B) OR (C XOR D)
Free magnetic layer into
which information is
encoded
Fig.1 Magneto-Logic gate consisting of 5 electrodes [2]
2) Logic Gates Using Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MJT)
Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MJT) can have a great impact
on our integrated circuits. It consists of two ferromagnets
separated by an insulator. There is a fixed layer which is also
called a reference layer. The other layer which is called a free
layer changes its direction according to the input field/current.
It has two different resistances depending upon the direction
of magnetization RP (Parallel) & RAP (Anti Parallel). This
resistance is called Tunnel Magneto-resistance. MJT is also
called a two level resistor. The output voltage of the MJT is at
most 100mV which is not enough to integrate it in a semi-
conductor. MJT can be used to make CMOS logic circuits
having the logical operation AND & OR between an external
input and internal input in a MJT by series and parallel
connection. Logic function with multiple input variables can
be designed by using such an MJT based logic circuits. This
method will reduce the area of silicon and the overall leakage
current. MJTs are ferromagnetic in nature which means they
are non volatile. Some of the major properties of MJTs are
programmability, noise resistance and radiation hardness.
These properties are helpful in improving digital computing.
MJT based logic circuits are far better than CMOS logic
circuits. CMOS based circuits consume power during the read,
write, and transfers and also during the logical operations.
MJT keeps operation simple and consumes less power [6, 15].
UPPER CONTACT
FERROMAGNET
Insulator Insulator Insulator
FERROMAGNET
LOWER CONTACT
SUBSTRATE
Fig. 2 A schematic magnetic tunnel junction (MJT) [16]
C. Quantum Computers
Quantum computers can solve very hard problems,
database searching prime factoring and quantum simulation.
Spin based quantum computers are long awaited and a new
paradigm in the field of electronics. Quantum computing
requires high level of external control and long quantum
coherence time. Quantum computers are most promising of all
of the Sprintronics devices because they have totally different
algorithms achieving the power of quantum effect in the
nature. One of the main factors of quantum computing is that
it has High storage capacity. As the number quantum bits
increases, storage capacity increases exponentially. A classical
register can store in a given moment of time only one out of 8
different numbers while a quantum register which has 3 qubits
can store in a given moment all the 8 numbers. This is how the
storage capacity increases exponentially. If there are 3 qubits
registers, it can store 8 numbers; a 4 qubit register can store 16
numbers. We can say that if there are N qubits register, 2 N
numbers can be stored which is increasing exponentially.
Another main factor of quantum computing is its fast
processing speed. This is done by parallel computation.
Quantum computing can save a lot of time and memory. QC
also has efficient algorithms. If we need to search a person in
the telephone directory, for quantum computer the task will
require only 100 steps rather than its counterpart which will
require 5000 steps. Next generation quantum computing will
overcome these conventional microchip machines taking us to
the new era of fast and efficient computing. One type of
quantum computing is Blind quantum computing in which
inputs, outputs and computation all remain unknown to the
computer [5, 13].
D. Spin Filters
Spin filtering allows one to obtain spin polarized charge
carriers which are formed by non magnetic electrodes using
magnetic tunnel barrier. It has been observed that magnetic
tunnelling through through ferromagnetic semiconductor can
be modified by applied magnetic field. Some spin filtering
properties were important in realizing a quantum computer.
Several other realizations were also discovered [3, 14].
E. Spin Diodes
Spin diodes are two terminal devices (like ordinary
diodes), who‟s properties depend upon the spin polarization
of the carriers. The current in the p-n junction depends upon
the relative orientation of the spin of the carriers. Spin diodes
can be a fundamental component of the electronics system [3].
F. Spin Transistors
Normal transistors use logic 1 and 0 for computer
information. Spin transistors uses spin up and spin down logic
for the same binary data. Spin transistors have at least one
semiconductor region and it integrates spin and charge
transport with in JFETs. Spin Field Effect Transistors (SFET)
is based on spin injection and spin detection by a
ferromagnetic source and drain. In SFET both drain and
source are ferromagnetic. It is not controlled by magnetic field
but by gate bias. But there are some complications to
fabrication at room temperature limiting this device to specific
materials and very clean surfaces. Another type of spin
transistors are Hot Electron Spin Transistors that rely on the
transport of non thermal carriers or hot carriers which has the
potential for serving many different purposes. They can be
used for diagnostic purposes & scattering process. These
transistors also have the ability to sense magnetic fields and
they also have some memory applications. SFET are much
faster and efficient than conventional FET. The spin states in
the spin transistor can be altered without electric current. Spin
transistors are often used in computers for data processing [3,
7].
III. ADVANTAGES & DISADVANTAGES OF SPINTRONICS
DEVICES
Spintronics devices offer very attractive and distinctive
features [1, 5]:
 They are very efficient which means they consume
very low power
 There is no electric current required to retain memory
 Spintronics based devices are very fast
 Spintronics devices like MRAM have very large
storage capacity
 Spintronics devices are very small in size
 Spintronics devices does not require special semi-
conductors, they can be implemented with Cu and Al
 Spin based memories are non-volatile
Some drawbacks of Sprintronics are [1]:
 Electron loses spin state due to silicon
 Controlling spin for longer distances
IV. CONCLUSION
Spintronics devices are fast and capable of very high data
storage. This technology may yield the next generation of
microelectronics. Nowadays every device is using the
technology of Sprintronics somehow. The most important
factor is that they consume less energy and are non-volatile.
With the discovery of Magnetic Tunnel Junctions, MRAM are
developed which is capable of high data storage. The next
generation quantum computers will be a paradigm changing
technology in the field of computing. The GMR technology is
very useful in magnetic field sensors. Still there is a lot of
room in the development of Sprintronics devices but much has
been accomplished. The future possibilities of spin valves can
lead to highly sensitive magnetic sensors. The field of
Sprintronics is still young and we cannot predict how it will
evolve.
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