Magnetic And Spintronic Materials For Electronics And Computing

Abstract

Global information and communications technology energy use is rapidly increasing, traditional CMOS scaling is coming to an end, and the skyrocketing computational needs of artificial intelligence are driving the need for new device physics and computing paradigms. It is a comprehensive review with eleven interconnected sections, which cover the entire history of modern spintronics, from the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), to tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) and magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) physics, followed by three generations of MRAM technology: spin-transfer torque (STT-MRAM), spin-orbit torque (SOT-MRAM), and voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA), and finally to skyrmions, antiferromagnetic spintronics, the recently uncovered phase of altermagnetism, 2D van der Waals magnets, neuromorphic computing hardware, compute-in-memory architectures, and future research directions. The key findings are: STT-MRAM commercialization at the 28 nm node, SOT switching at 0.35ns, VCMA coefficient of over 300 fJ/V•m, experimental confirmation of altermagnetism by spin-resolved angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy in α-MnTe and CrSb, room-temperature 2D ferromagnetism in Fe₃GaTe₂ with the 2D anisotropy over 19,000% compared with that of CoFeB, colossal tunneling magnetoresistance of over 19,000% in CrI₃ spin-filter heterostructures, and comprehensive synaptic plasticity in 2H-MoTe₂:PVA composite memristors with validated neuromorphic performance by convolutional neural networks. The synthesis finds that the most promising near-term MRAM paths will be a hybrid STT+SOT+VCMA architecture and that there is a diversification of the other directions into neuromorphic, topological, and two-dimensional spintronic architectures.