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

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 300 K to 360 K. 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 (ξ). 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]