This
study reports the current-induced switching of a Co20Fe60B20/MgO/Co20Fe60B20-based perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction (p-MTJ) with
a [Co/Pt]4 stack as a synthetic anti-ferromagnetic (SAF)
layer. Electrical and spectroscopic evidence of p-MTJs reveals that
the pinning of the Co20Fe60B20 layer
by the SAF through a Ta spacer layer enhances the switching resistance
after annealing at 650 K (375 °C). A drastic improvement of 6
times in the tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) was observed after
annealing in an external magnetic field (14% for as-deposited and
83% for annealed both for zero bias). The TMR also shows a gradual
increased behavior with bias at room temperature, which may be attributed
to the multi-domain switching with increase in current. The analogous
SAF-based MTJ devices were modeled using the non-equilibrium Green’s
function (NEGF) to validate the experimental results. The existence
of a stable TMR and the low switching current density of the fabricated
p-MTJ structures provides higher reliability and low-power operation.
This makes it attractive for next-generation MTJ applications, especially
for embedded memory, system-on-chip, IoT, and neuromorphic computing
applications.