Design and fabrication of a perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction based nonvolatile programmable switch achieving 40% less area using shared-control transistor structure.

A compact nonvolatile programmable switch (NVPS) using 90 nm CMOS technology together with perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction (p-MTJ) devices is fabricated for zero-standby-power field-programmable gate array. Because routing information does not change once it is programmed into an NVPS, high-speed read and write accesses are not required and a write-control transistor can be shared among all the NVPSs, which greatly simplifies structure of the NVPS. In fact, the effective area of the proposed NVPS is reduced by 40% compared to that of a conventional MTJ-based NVPS. The instant on/off behavior without external nonvolatile memory access is also demonstrated using the fabricated test chip.