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Journal of Electron Microscopy Advance Access published online on May 5, 2006
Journal of Electron Microscopy, 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
Received January 16, 2006
Accepted March 13, 2006

Full-length: Physical

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

Jong-Bong Park 1, Gyeong-Su Park 1 *, In-Yong Song 1, Jun-Soo Bae 2, Jang-Eun Lee 2, Jeong-Ho Yoo 3, Yasukazu Murakami 3, and Daisuke Shindo 3

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.
Gyeong-Su Park, E-mail: gs8144.park{at}samsung.com


  Abstract

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.
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