Ultrafast and low-energy switching in voltage-controlled elliptical pMTJ

Abstract: Switching magnetization in a perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction (pMTJ) via voltage controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) has shown the potential to markedly reduce the switching energy. However, the requirement of an external magnetic field poses a critical bottleneck for its practical applications. In this work, we propose an elliptical-shaped pMTJ to eliminate the requirement of providing an external field by an additional circuit. We demonstrate that a 10 nm thick in-plane magnetized bias layer (BL) separated by a metallic spacer of 3 nm from the free layer (FL) can be engineered within the MTJ stack to provide the 50 mT bias magnetic field for switching. By conducting macrospin simulation, we find that a fast switching in 0.38 ns with energy consumption as low as 0.3 fJ at a voltage of 1.6 V can be achieved. Furthermore, we study the phase diagram of switching probability, showing that a pulse duration margin of 0.15 ns is obtained and a low-voltage operation (~ 1 V) is favored. Finally, the MTJ scalability is considered, and it is found that scaling-down may not be appealing in terms of both the energy consumption and the switching time for the precession based VCMA switching.