Effect of Edge Roughness on resistance and switching voltage of Magnetic Tunnel Junctions

TL;DR

This paper studies how edge roughness affects the electrical resistance and switching voltage in magnetic tunnel junctions, revealing increased variability at smaller sizes and proposing models for efficient analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic model of edge roughness effects on magnetic tunnel junctions and proposes simplified geometric approximations for efficient calculations.

Findings

Variations in resistance and switching voltage increase as junction size decreases.

Edge roughness significantly impacts electrical properties due to quantum confinement.

Proposed geometric models improve the efficiency of edge roughness effect calculations.

Abstract

We investigate the impact of edge roughness on the electrical transport properties of magnetic tunnel junctions using non-equilibrium Greens function formalism. We have modeled edge roughness as a stochastic variation in the cross-sectional profile of magnetic tunnel junction characterized by the stretched exponential decay of the correlation function. The stochastic variation in the shape and size changes the transverse energy mode profile and gives rise to the variations in the resistance and switching voltage of the magnetic tunnel junction. We find that the variations are larger as the magnetic tunnel junction size is scaled down due to the quantum confinement effect. A model is proposed for the efficient calculation of edge roughness effects by approximating the cross-sectional geometry to a circle with the same cross-sectional area. Further improvement can be obtained by approximating the cross-sectional area to an ellipse with an aspect ratio determined by the first transverse eigenvalue corresponding to the 2D cross section. These results would be useful for reliable design of the spin transfer torque-magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) with ultra-small magnetic tunnel junctions.