A recent report from ITRS ERD/ERM working group has identified STT MRAM and RedoxRAM as the most promising candidates for emerging scalable and manufacturable non-volatile memories1. This paper is focused on MRAM. It explains how the heating produced by Joule dissipation around the tunnel barrier of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJ) can be used to assist the writing in MRAM.
This thermally assisted (TA) writing allows extending the downsize scalability of MRAM as it does in hard disk drive technology, but it also allows introducing new functionalities particularly useful for security applications.
