Magnetoresistive Thin Film Materials and Their Device Applications

Abstract

The study of magnetoresistive materials has been much intensified after the discovery of the giant magnetoresistive (GMR) effect in 1988 (Baibich et al., 1988), along with the decades of steady progress made in the anisotropic magnetoresistive (AMR) materials (McGuire and Potter, 1975; and Lee et al., 2000). In the past several years there have been mainly three additional factors that contributed in further worldwide research and development in this area. The first is the achievement of >10% magneto resistance (MR) ratio at room temperature for spin dependent tunneling (SDT) materials (Moodera et al., 1995). The second is the rapid development in the disk drive industry that brought in and quickly phased out AMR materials, and thus brought about the needs for using the GMR materials and beyond (Johnson, 1997). The third is the need and the potential brought up by these materials for practical nonvolatile memory devices, partly because of the failure of other types of magnetic memories such as bubble memory, which excites intensive research and development of magnetic random access memory (MRAM) technology (Daughton, 1992a, 1992b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]