University of Minnesota-led discovery has potential to create devices with ‘unmatched’ energy efficiency and memory storage density
Researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, along with a team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have developed a breakthrough process to create spintronic devices that could become the new industry standard for semiconductor chips that make up computers. Developed. Smartphones, and many other electronic devices. New processes enable faster and more efficient spintronic devices that can be made ever smaller. ??
The researcher’s paper is published in Advanced Functional Materials, a leading peer-reviewed materials science journal. The researcher also worked with the University of Minnesota Technology Commercialization and her NIST to patent this technology, along with several other patents related to this work.
Senior author of the paper, Jian-Ping Wang, said: Professor and Robert F. Hartman Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota. “Spintronics are very important for building microelectronics with new capabilities.”
Wang said Minnesota has taken a significant lead in this effort for more than a decade, with strong support from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). said.
This discovery also opens up new research streams for the design and fabrication of spintronic devices in the next decade.
“This means that companies like Honeywell, Skywater, Globalfoundries, Intel, and others can integrate this material into their semiconductor manufacturing processes and products,” said Wang. “It’s very exciting because it will enable industry engineers to design even more powerful systems.”
The semiconductor industry is constantly trying to miniaturize chips that can maximize the energy efficiency, computational speed, and data storage capacity of electronic devices. Spintronic devices, which utilize the spin of electrons rather than charge to store data, offer a promising and more efficient alternative to traditional transistor-based chips. These materials can also be non-volatile. This means less power is required, memory can be saved and computing can still run after power is removed.
Spintronic materials have been successfully integrated into semiconductor chips for over a decade, but the industry-standard spintronic material, cobalt-iron-boron, has reached its scalability limits. Today, engineers cannot make devices smaller than 20 nanometers without losing their ability to store data.
By showing that iron-palladium, an alternative to cobalt-iron-boron that requires less energy and has more data storage potential, can be shrunk to sizes as small as 5 nanometers, University of Minnesota researchers said. We have circumvented this problem.
Also, for the first time, the researchers were able to grow iron-palladium on silicon wafers using a multi-chamber ultra-high-vacuum sputtering system for 8-inch wafers. National and available only at the University of Minnesota.
“This work represents for the first time in the world a so-called CMOS+X strategy that can grow this material, which can be scaled down to less than 5 nanometers, on substrates compatible with the semiconductor industry.” Author and Ph.D. Deyuan Lyu. He is a student of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
“Our team was challenged to develop new materials to fabricate the spintronic devices needed for next-generation, data-intensive applications,” said NIST staff scientist and research principal. Daniel Gopman, one of the key contributors, said: “It will be exciting to see how this advancement will drive the further growth of spintronic devices in the world of semiconductor chip technology.”
Original: Researchers create breakthrough spintronic manufacturing process that could revolutionize electronics industry
Than: University of Minnesota | National Institute of Standards and Technology
