On Wednsday 5 december, Luc TILLIE defends his PhD at 14h00 in room Chrome 1 of Maison Minatec – 3, Parvis Louis Néel, 38054 GRENOBLE Cedex .

Luc TILLIE, will defend his thesis, jointly carried out by LETI/DCOS/SCME/LCM and SPINTEC, entitled :

« Study and optimization of thermal stability and temperature dependence of P-STTMRAM for industrial applications. »

With the amount of data increasing drastically during the last few decades, the need for new technological solutions rose. One of the answers to this problem consists in improving the actual hardware with emerging Non-Volatile Memories (e-NVM). Within these new solutions, the Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) gains a lot of attention from the industrial market. With their supposed unlimited endurance, high speed switching, low voltage operations and high data retention at room temperature, the MRAM, especially the Perpendicular Spin Transfer Torque MRAM (P-STT-MRAM), is seen as one of the best contenders for DRAM, SRAM and embedded Flash replacement. To be used in industrial applications, the P-STT-MRAM has to answer to a large range of requirements in terms of data retention (e.g 10 years) and high operating temperature (more than 200°C). However, as measuring high data retention is not practical, solutions have to be found to extract it fastly. This manuscript will propose and compare different thermal stability factor extraction protocols for P-STTMRAM. The most adapted will be used to model the temperature and size dependence of this factor. Then, the temperature limits of P-STT-MRAM will be characterized and different flavours of storage layers will be match with industrial applications. Finally, the electrical parameters dependence with an external magnetic field will be studied and a linear magnetic sensor based on a P-STT-MRAM device will be proposed.