High Temperature Spin-Dependent Tunneling Materials

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of making Spin-Dependent Tunneling (SDT) materials with high temperature durability. These SDT materials will withstand the temperatures encountered during chip packaging and in standard CMOS back end processing, and they will demonstrate long term stability at operating temperatures to 150 ¿C. Nonvolatile Electronics, Inc. has demonstrated the functionality of SDT devices at wafer level using photolithography techniques. These SDT devices have the high sensitivity (3%/Oe), necessary for very low field applications, and have high impedance (1 to lOOM-Ohm um2), leading to very lower power consumption. However, they show relatively poor thermal stability, which will be an obstacle for making either discrete or integrated devices. A Phase II program will further optimize the materials/device properties and integrate SDT devices with standard CMOS semiconductor technology and standard chip packaging. Memory, logic, and sensor functions will be demonstrated in Phase II using these optimized structures. There are immediate commercial opportunities for magnetic field and current sensing devices, low power isolators, solid state relays, and magnetic random access memories.