SBIR Phase II: Dual Magnetic Tunnel Junction (DMTJ) Materials and Structures for STT-RAM

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II project will address material innovations required to successfully take spin-transfer torque (STT) switching phenomenon from a research environment to commercialization. The goal of this Phase II project is to deliver Dual Magnetic Tunnel Junction (DMTJ) technology at three progressively smaller technology nodes, and to develop a package of data on DMTJ devices, including materials structure, read and write performance, and reliability characteristics, that can be transferred to licensees for commercialization. The outcome of this project will be STT based Random Access memory (STT-RAM), a fast, high density, low power, nonvolatile universal memory solution that has the potential to displace mainstream semiconductor memories such as Static RAM, Dynamic RAM and Flash in both embedded and standalone memory markets, and create entirely new sectors in the semiconductor industry. Not only can STT-RAM replace each of these memories individually, but from a system perspective, STT-RAM offers the potential to revolutionize electronic system architectures in a way that can significantly reduce power, component count, area and cost, while dramatically improving system functionality and performance.