Impact of ambient temperature on the switching of voltage-controlled perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction

Abstract

Voltage control of the magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) effect enables a voltage-mediated magnetization switching mechanism for lower-power applications. In this work, we experimentally investigate the characteristics of VCMA-induced switching and we observe a clear decrease in the critical switching voltage (

V

c) at elevated temperatures. A 50% reduction in

V

c is quantified when increasing the ambient temperature (T) from 300K to 360K. Such a T-dependence of

V

c is well explained with the variations of saturation magnetization (

M

S), interfacial anisotropy (

K

i), and VCMA coefficient (

xi). In addition, the dependences of these properties on temperature are well fitted and explained with the power law of

M

S ( T ). Our findings on the T-dependent magnetic and switching characteristics of VCMA are of technological importance for implementing VCMA in magnetic random access memory (MRAM) applications.