The University of Minnesota Twin Cities made a new breakthrough in the manufacturing process of spintronic devices

A joint team of University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a breakthrough process for fabricating spintronic devices that has the potential to become the new industry standard for semiconductor chips. The research paper was published in the recent "Advanced Functional Materials".

Spintronic devices store data using the spin of electrons rather than charge, offering a promising and more efficient alternative to conventional transistor-based chips. The industry-standard spintronic material cobalt-iron-boron has reached its limit of scalability. Currently, engineers cannot fabricate devices smaller than 20 nanometers without losing their ability to store data.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota overcame this challenge by using an iron-palladium material instead of cobalt-iron-boron, which allowed them to shrink the material to a size of 5 nanometers. For the first time, researchers were able to grow iron palladium on silicon wafers using a multi-chamber ultra-high vacuum sputtering system that supports 8-inch wafers.

According to the researchers, this achievement is the first in the world to show that the growth of this material on a substrate compatible with the semiconductor industry can be scaled down to less than 5 nanometers.