Toshiba develops spin-transport electronics cell

Toshiba has developed MOSFET1 cell based on spin-transport electronics, or spintronics, an advanced semiconductor technology that makes use of the spin and magnetic moment inherent in electrons.

Toshiba will present full details of the cell and its technologies at the International Electronics Devices Meeting2 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Electrons in a magnetic layer are naturally spin polarised in one of two spin states, spin up or spin down, and the majority state determines the spin state.

These spin states are more or less permanent in a magnetic layer, realising a nonvolatile characteristic that can be used to store data.

Spin current can be flowed into the same spin state in a magnetic layer and this capability changes the impedance characteristics that determine the read signal of a spin device.

Toshiba has introduced magnetic layers into the source and drain of a MOSFET cell and successfully applied these to controlling spin direction by the spin-transfer-torque-switching (STS) method, and by applying gate and source/drain voltages.

A magnetic tunnel junction3 is applied for write operation of STS in the magnetic layers, which are formed with full-Heusler alloy, an intermetallic that acts as a high-spin polariser.

Toshiba confirmed the practical performance in transistor level of the scalable spintronics-based MOSFET device that promises fast random write and access speeds with low power consumption.

It opens the way to next-generation non-volatile semiconductor devices that can be used as reconfigurable logic devices and non-volatile LSI chip with memory function.

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