All-Electrical Control of Compact SOT-MRAM: Toward Highly Efficient and Reliable Non-Volatile In-Memory Computing

Abstract

Two-dimensional van der Waals (2D vdW) ferromagnets possess outstanding scalability, controllable ferromagnetism, and out-of-plane anisotropy, enabling the compact spintronics-based non-volatile in-memory computing (nv-IMC) that promises to tackle the memory wall bottleneck issue. Here, by employing the intriguing room-temperature ferromagnetic characteristics of emerging 2D Fe3GeTe2 with the dissimilar electronic structure of the two spin-conducting channels, we report on a new type of non-volatile spin-orbit torque (SOT) magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) device based on Fe3GeTe2/MgO/Fe3GeTe2 heterostructure, which demonstrates the uni-polar and high-speed field-free magnetization switching by adjusting the ratio of field-like torque to damping-like torque coefficient in the free layer. Compared to the conventional 2T1M structure, the developed 3-transistor-2-MTJ (3T2M) cell is implemented with the complementary data storage feature and the enhanced sensing margin of 201.4% (from 271.7 mV to 547.2 mV) and 276% (from 188.2 mV to 520 mV) for reading “1” and “0”, respectively. Moreover, superior to the traditional CoFeB-based MTJ memory cell counterpart, the 3T2M crossbar array architecture can be executed for AND/NAND, OR/NOR Boolean logic operation with a fast latency of 24 ps and ultra-low power consumption of 2.47 fJ/bit. Such device to architecture design with elaborated micro-magnetic and circuit-level simulation results shows great potential for realizing high-performance 2D material-based compact SOT magnetic random-access memory, facilitating new applications of highly reliable and energy-efficient nv-IMC.

Keywords

• spin-orbit torque
• field-free magnetization switching
• Fe₃GeTe₂
• magnetoresistive random-access memory
• non-volatile in-memory computing