GMR materials for low field applications

Abstract

The higher magnetoresistance of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) material offers potential improvements for magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM), magnetoresistive read heads, and magnetic field sensors. Saturation field, linearity, hysteresis, sheet resistivity, magnetostriction, and other factors can impact the utility of GMR materials in applications. These factors are compared for several GMR structures: magnetic sandwiches and multilayers, antiferromagnetic-coupled and uncoupled sandwiches and multilayers, vertical GMR multilayers, and granular films. The most promising GMR materials for low field applications are uncoupled sandwiches and low antiferromagnetic coupled multilayers using inplane conduction. They can be superior to anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) materials and Hall effect devices for many applications.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>