SMARTSPIN

Magnetic Insulators: An Enabling Platform for Innovative Spintronic Concepts

Project name: SMARTSPIN  - Magnetic Insulators: An Enabling Platform for Innovative Spintronic Concepts
Project duration: 07/2023 – 06/2025
Budget: 200’000 €
Project reference: CNS2022-136060

In SMARTSPIN, we will build innovative and energy-efficient spintronic devices that could be implemented into the current or prospective data storage and processing units and help reduce the energy consumption of the information technologies. Our proposal is an ambitious attempt to bridge the attractive spintronic properties of magnetic insulators with the realities of technological spintronic applications that require an all-electrical operation.
In the target device, data will be stored in the magnetization state of a ferrimagnetic insulator with perpendicular anisotropy and written/read by passing current through adjacent layers grown on top. Unlike the conventional approach where the spin Hall effect of a heavy metal is employed for magnetization switching and detection, we propose to use a bilayer consisting of a light metal and a conducting ferromagnetic layers. This combination will enable us to realize
1. Efficient two-terminal magnetoresistive reading of the magnetization state of a PMA MI with very large output signal.
2. Efficient field-free switching of the ferrimagnetic insulator by exploiting novel SOT mechanisms based on interfacial spin-orbit filtering and spin-orbit precession effects.
3. A gate-tunable three-terminal memory device where magnetization can be read and written by using the mechanisms achieved in O1 and O2, respectively