Impact of self-heating on reliability predictions in STT-MRAM

Abstract

At breakdown conditions, large current flows in STT-MRAM devices. We experimentally show that this large current causes significant self-heating of 200-300°C, which impacts the reliability extrapolation to operating conditions. By measuring and analyzing breakdown at various temperatures and on different MgO thickness, we successfully incorporate self-heating into the breakdown model. We find that the 10 year lifetime is underestimated by a factor 103 at 63-percentile, to even 107 when applying percentile scaling to 1 ppm.