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Journal of Electron Microscopy Advance Access originally published online on May 5, 2006
Journal of Electron Microscopy 2006 55(1):17-21; doi:10.1093/jmicro/dfl007
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Japanese Society of Microscopy. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Analysis of magnetic microstructure in MRAM bits by electron holography and Lorentz microscopy

Jong-Bong Park1, Gyeong-Su Park1,*, In-Yong Song1, Jun-Soo Bae2, Jang-Eun Lee2, Jeong-Ho Yoo3, Yasukazu Murakami3 and Daisuke Shindo3

1 Analytical Engineering Center, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology PO Box 111, Suwon 440-600, Korea
2 Process Development Team, Memory Division, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd San#24 Nongseo-Ri, Giheung-Eup, Yongin-City, Gyeonggi-Do, 449-711, Korea
3 Institute of multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials, Tohoku University Sendai 980-8577, Japan

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gs8144.park{at}samsung.com

Magnetic flux and magnetic domain structure in fabricated MRAM bits were observed by an electron holography technique under the residual magnetic field <0.2 mT at the specimen position. The small residual filed condition without the objective lens switched off increases the detection limit of a magnetic field in the electron holography. Here we report a detailed analysis of the magnetic microstructure in MRAM bits performed by extracting the magnetic information alone from a reconstructed phase image. The MRAM bits fabricated with a 12 nm CoFeBx-free layer revealed non-uniform distributions in the magnetic flux and the magnetic domain structure contrary to the MRAM bits with a 6 nm CoFeBx-free layer. Lorentz microscopy study of the MRAM bits with the application of external magnetic fields allows us to quantitatively evaluate the expected magnetic switching field of the MRAM bits which should be an important factor to achieve a high-density MRAMs.

Keywords     electron holography, MRAM bits, Lorentz microscopy, reconstructed image, magnetic flux, CoFeBx-free layer

Received     16 January 2006, accepted 13 March 2006


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