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A multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory
The coexistence and coupling between magnetization and electric polarization in multiferroic materials provide extra degrees of freedom for creating next-generation memory devices. A variety of concepts of multiferroic or magnetoelectric memories have been proposed and explored in the past decade. H...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5041080/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27681812 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep34473 |
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author | Shen, Jianxin Cong, Junzhuang Shang, Dashan Chai, Yisheng Shen, Shipeng Zhai, Kun Sun, Young |
author_facet | Shen, Jianxin Cong, Junzhuang Shang, Dashan Chai, Yisheng Shen, Shipeng Zhai, Kun Sun, Young |
author_sort | Shen, Jianxin |
collection | PubMed |
description | The coexistence and coupling between magnetization and electric polarization in multiferroic materials provide extra degrees of freedom for creating next-generation memory devices. A variety of concepts of multiferroic or magnetoelectric memories have been proposed and explored in the past decade. Here we propose a new principle to realize a multilevel nonvolatile memory based on the multiple states of the magnetoelectric coefficient (α) of multiferroics. Because the states of α depends on the relative orientation between magnetization and polarization, one can reach different levels of α by controlling the ratio of up and down ferroelectric domains with external electric fields. Our experiments in a device made of the PMN-PT/Terfenol-D multiferroic heterostructure confirm that the states of α can be well controlled between positive and negative by applying selective electric fields. Consequently, two-level, four-level, and eight-level nonvolatile memory devices are demonstrated at room temperature. This kind of multilevel magnetoelectric memory retains all the advantages of ferroelectric random access memory but overcomes the drawback of destructive reading of polarization. In contrast, the reading of α is nondestructive and highly efficient in a parallel way, with an independent reading coil shared by all the memory cells. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5041080 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-50410802016-09-30 A multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory Shen, Jianxin Cong, Junzhuang Shang, Dashan Chai, Yisheng Shen, Shipeng Zhai, Kun Sun, Young Sci Rep Article The coexistence and coupling between magnetization and electric polarization in multiferroic materials provide extra degrees of freedom for creating next-generation memory devices. A variety of concepts of multiferroic or magnetoelectric memories have been proposed and explored in the past decade. Here we propose a new principle to realize a multilevel nonvolatile memory based on the multiple states of the magnetoelectric coefficient (α) of multiferroics. Because the states of α depends on the relative orientation between magnetization and polarization, one can reach different levels of α by controlling the ratio of up and down ferroelectric domains with external electric fields. Our experiments in a device made of the PMN-PT/Terfenol-D multiferroic heterostructure confirm that the states of α can be well controlled between positive and negative by applying selective electric fields. Consequently, two-level, four-level, and eight-level nonvolatile memory devices are demonstrated at room temperature. This kind of multilevel magnetoelectric memory retains all the advantages of ferroelectric random access memory but overcomes the drawback of destructive reading of polarization. In contrast, the reading of α is nondestructive and highly efficient in a parallel way, with an independent reading coil shared by all the memory cells. Nature Publishing Group 2016-09-29 /pmc/articles/PMC5041080/ /pubmed/27681812 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep34473 Text en Copyright © 2016, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Shen, Jianxin Cong, Junzhuang Shang, Dashan Chai, Yisheng Shen, Shipeng Zhai, Kun Sun, Young A multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory |
title | A multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory |
title_full | A multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory |
title_fullStr | A multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory |
title_full_unstemmed | A multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory |
title_short | A multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory |
title_sort | multilevel nonvolatile magnetoelectric memory |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5041080/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27681812 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep34473 |
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