Memory - Page 10

UCLA has received a $8.4 million grant from DARPA to research ultra-low-power, non-volatile logic technologies. This is the same DARPA project that also awarded a contract to Grandis on the same subject a couple of weeks ago.

The UCLA researchers are aiming to develop a prototype non-volatile logic circuit, which could lead to the development of new classes of ultra–low-power, high-performance electronics. The research program will explore three technical areas: the behavior of nanoscale magnetic materials; the fabrication and testing of a non-volatile logic circuit; and the development of novel circuits and circuit-design tools.

The project will be managed at UCLA by research associate Pedram Khalili and will be led under principal investigators Kang Wang and Alex Khitun. It will involved researchers from UCLA, UC Irvine, Yale University and the University of Massachusetts.

Grandis has been awarded a new contract from DARPA to use their spintronics and magnetic-material expertise and develop non-volatile spin logic applications: which promises non-volatile, ultra-fast, radiation-hard and radically lower power consumption.

Development work will focus on integrating magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) materials capable of sensing very small magnetic fields with nano-magnets performing logic operations. The goal is to demonstrate non-volatile spin logic circuits operating at ultra-fast speeds of less than 1 nanosecond and ultra-low power consumption of less than 10 atto-Joules per operation. Such performance coupled with the inherent non-volatility of spin logic devices will enable not just significant reductions in the active power consumption of microprocessors but also the virtual elimination of standby power consumption.

Scientists from Ohio University has created a new spintronics memory device from plastic. It’s simply a thin strip of dark blue organic-based magnet layered with a metallic ferromagnet and connected to two electrical leads. Still, the researchers successfully recorded data on it and retrieved the data by controlling the spins of the electrons with a magnetic field. They say that the new device is a bridge between today’s computers and the all-polymer, spintronic computers that the researchers hope to eventually create.

Professor Russell Cowburn from the Imperial College in London has been awarded €2.8 million to work on spintronics, with the aim of developing new microchips that can store thousands of times more data than today’s microchips.

Professor Cowburn hopes to develop chips that hold many active components stacked on top of each other, allowing more data to be stored in the same sized chip.

A group led by Professor Hideo Ohno in the Laboratory of Nanoelectronics and Spintronics, at Tohoku University is working to develop new integrated circuits using spintronics. The ICs store data in nonvolatile memory using magnetism (MRAM), so their standby power can be made zero. This memory utilizes the tunnel magneto-resistance effect.

Osaka's university has a Spintronics research group that is working towards MRAM and STT-RAM using several materials including Graphene. Here's a nice intro video about the group:

Prof. Albert Fert (who won the Nobel prize in 2007 for GMR) talks about GMR and Spintronics:

Researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated for the first time the existence of a key magnetic—as opposed to electronic—property of specially built semiconductor devices. This discovery raises hopes for even smaller and faster gadgets that could result from magnetic data storage in a semiconductor material, which could then quickly process the data through built-in logic circuits controlled by electric fields.

In a new paper, researchers from NIST, Korea University and the University of Notre Dame have confirmed theorists’ hopes that thin magnetic layers of semiconductor material could exhibit a prized property known as antiferromagnetic coupling—in which one layer spontaneously aligns its magnetic pole in the opposite direction as the next magnetic layer. The discovery of antiferromagnetic coupling in metals was the basis of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, but it is only recently that it has become conceivable for semiconductor materials. Semiconductors with magnetic properties would not only be able to process data, but also store it.

In the race to develop the next generation of storage and recording media, a major hurdle has been the difficulty of studying the tiny magnetic structures that will serve as their building blocks. Now a team of physicists at the University of California, Davis, has developed a technique to capture the magnetic “fingerprints” of certain nanostructures — even when they are buried within the boards and junctions of an electronic device.

Due to the miniscule physical dimensions of nanomagnets — some are as small as 50 atoms wide — observing their magnetic configurations has been a challenge, especially when they are not exposed but built into a functioning device.

To tackle this challenge, Liu and three of his students, Jared Wong, Peter Greene and Randy Dumas, created copper nanowires embedded with magnetic cobalt nanodisks. Then they applied a series of magnetic fields to the wires and measured the responses from the nanodisks. By starting each cycle at full saturation — that is, using a field strong
enough to align all the nanomagnets — then applying a progressively more negative field with each reversal, they created a series of information-rich graphic patterns known to physicists as “first-order reversal curve (FORC) distributions.”

Researchers in France and the US have lowered the current required for spin transfer down to just 120 microamps at room temperature for a device that measures 45 nm across.

Spin transfer is when the spin angular momentum of charge carriers (usually electrons) in a material is transferred from one place to another. In the MRAM industry, Spin Transfer might help to significantly reduce power consumption, but it draws a large current. But the new technique can help with that. 

Stéphane Mangin from Nancy University and colleagues may fabricated 45 nm diameter spin valves based on cobalt-nickel multilayer elements. Because these devices exhibit perpendicular anisotropy, they are thermally stable and require currents as low as 120 microamps for spin transfer switching without any applied magnetic field.