Wüest M. 51 Wykes M. 82 Yamaguchi M. 17 Ybarra G. 129 Yubero F ...

JUNE 26 MONDAY MORNING
RIVA-TF-MoM-INV.1THIN FILM STACKS FOR SPINTRONIC DEVICES: PREPARATION
AND CHARACTERIZATION, P.P.Freitas, S.Freitas and R.Ferreira. INESC MN, Lisbon, Portugal
and Physics Department, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal
Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD) and Ion Beam Deposition (IBD) tools are described as used for the
preparation of spintronic device stacks ( hard disk read heads-spin valve and tunnel junction,
MRAMS, sensor stacks). These tools allow the uniform deposition of multilayered stacks over 8” wafers,
where each individual layer has thickneses down to 1nm. The formation of nm thick AlOx and
MgO barriers, critical to the formation of state of the art tunnel barriers is revised. For device patterning,
both ion-milling and reactive ion etching techniques are used, the latter becoming necessary for
device features below 100nm. The complexity of the magnetic stacks poses several challenges for reactive
etching techniques. Finally, spintronic device examples will be given, starting with magnetic
tunel junction read heads for magnetic data storage at densities beyond 100Gbit/in2, followed by
MRAMS, and different types of field sensors for position, current, and biomedical imaging applications.
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