Thermal robustness of magnetic tunnel junctions with perpendicular shape anisotropy.

The concept of Perpendicular Shape Anisotropy STT-MRAM (PSA-STT-MRAM) has been recently proposed as a solution to enable the downsize scalability of STT-MRAM devices beyond the sub-20 nm technology node. For conventional p-STT-MRAM devices with sub-20 nm diameters, the perpendicular anisotropy arising from the MgO/CoFeB interface becomes too weak to ensure thermal stability of the storage layer. In addition, this interfacial anisotropy rapidly decreases with increasing temperature which constitutes a drawback in applications with a large range of operating temperatures.

Microwave amplification in a magnetic tunnel junction induced by heat-to-spin conversion at the nanoscale.

Heat-driven engines are hard to realize in nanoscale machines because of efficient heat dissipation. However, in the realm of spintronics, heat has been employed successfully-for example, heat current has been converted into a spin current in a NiFe|Pt bilayer system, and Joule heating has enabled selective writing in magnetic memory arrays. Here, we use Joule heating in nanoscale magnetic tunnel junctions to create a giant spin torque due to a magnetic anisotropy change.

A highly thermally stable sub-20 nm magnetic random-access memory based on perpendicular shape anisotropy.

A new approach to increase the downsize scalability of perpendicular STT-MRAM is presented. It consists of significantly increasing the thickness of the storage layer in out-of-plane magnetized tunnel junctions (pMTJ) as compared to conventional pMTJ in order to induce a perpendicular shape anisotropy (PSA) in this layer. This PSA is obtained by depositing a thick ferromagnetic (FM) layer on top of an MgO/FeCoB based magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) so that the thickness of the storage layer is of the order of or larger than the diameter of the MTJ pillar.

Fabrication of nanotweezers and their remote actuation by magnetic fields.

A new kind of nanodevice that acts like tweezers through remote actuation by an external magnetic field is designed. Such device is meant to mechanically grab micrometric objects. The nanotweezers are built by using a top-down approach and are made of two parallelepipedic microelements, at least one of them being magnetic, bound by a flexible nanohinge.

[Monitoring of human physiological functions during the daily night sleep].

The basic somnological methodology, which is extensively used in the present time, focuses only on clinical practice. However, this approach is not appropriate for monitoring of physiological functions during natural sleep under home conditions. Our work was designed to develop a new information-and-equipment device for the reliable study of human physiological functions during sleep in the real everyday life.