Conference paper
Breakthrough In Current In Plane Metrology For Monitoring Large Scale MRAM Production
The current-in-plane tunneling technique (CIPT) has been a crucial tool in the development of magnetic tunnel junction stacks suitable for Magnetic Random Access Memories (MRAM) for more than a decade. The MRAM development has now reached the maturity to make the transition from R&D to large-scale production.
This will require a metrology to precisely monitor the properties of the MTJ stacks over 300 mm wafers with high performance in terms of reproducibility and repeatability. Here, we present a major breakthrough in the CIPT metrology that can deliver a substantial improvement on the precision of the Resistance Area product (RA) and the Tunnel Magnetoresistance (TMR) measurements, compared to state of the art CIPT metrology tools dedicated to R&D.
On two test wafers, the repeatability of RA and MR was improved up to 350% and the measurement reproducibility up to 1700%. We believe that CIPT metrology now constitutes a very strong candidate for monitoring MRAM production, since it can guarantee the high metrology performance needed for the advent of the MRAM era.
Language: | English |
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Publisher: | IEEE |
Year: | 2017 |
Pages: | 169-171 |
Proceedings: | 2017 IEEE 9th International Memory Workshop |
ISBN: | 1509032746 , 1509032754 , 9781509032747 and 9781509032754 |
Types: | Conference paper |
DOI: | 10.1109/IMW.2017.7939073 |
ORCIDs: | Hansen, Ole and Petersen, Dirch Hjorth |