Annealing effects on CoFeB-MgO magnetic tunnel junctions with perpendicular anisotropy

We studied annealing effects on perpendicular anisotropy in CoFeB-MgO magnetic tunnel junctions. The results show that annealing is an effective method to improve the perpendicular anisotropy of a CoFeB-MgO system. It is found that a thicker CoFeB layer requires a higher annealing temperature to buildup its perpendicular anisotropy. However, perpendicular anisotropy could be seriously degraded if the annealing temperature is more than 350 °C. Our study suggests that CoFeB thickness should be optimized so that the required annealing temperature window for perpendicular anisotropy could match the annealing temperature for high magnetoresistance. In this work, the perpendicular anisotropy energy density of 2.5 × 106 erg/cm3 was achieved with tunnel magnetoresistive value exceeding 70%. The use of CoFeB films will enable the development of high density nonvolatile memory with size down to 30 nm.