Date of Award

12-2016

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Joerg Appenzeller

Committee Chair

Joerg Appenzeller

Committee Member 1

Zhihong Cheng

Committee Member 2

Supriyo Datta

Committee Member 3

Dmitri E. Nikonov

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, several key discoveries, such as Giant and Tunneling Magne- toresistance, and advances in magnetic materials have paved the way for exponentially higher bit-densities in magnetic storage. In particular, the discovery of Spin-Transfer Torque (STT) has allowed information to be written to individual magnets using spin-currents. This has replaced the more traditional Oersted-field control used in field-MRAMs and allowed further scaling of magnetic-memories. A less obvious con- sequence of STT is that it has made possible a logic-technology based on magnets controlled by spin-polarized currents. Charge-coupled Spin Logic (CSL) is one such device proposal that couples a giant spin Hall effect(GSHE) write-unit with a Mag- netic Tunnel Junction read-unit. Several theoretical reports have demonstrated that a CSL-style device can function as a fundamental building block for neuromorphic computing by harnessing the intrinsic properties of magnets. This thesis describes the working of a CSL device. Experimental progress towards building the individual components of CSL and also our efforts to integrate these components into a CSL prototype will be presented. In addition to the integration effort, this work also explores spin-injection from a GSHE metal to a nanoscale magnet through an intermediate non-magnetic metal. Our results indicate that with the right choice of intermediate layers, the spin-angular mo- mentum absorbed by the magnet can be increased without engineering the intrinsic spin Hall angle of the GSHE metal. Finally, this work also proposes a Schottky-barrier model to describe the current flow through low-dimensional semiconductors and uses it to extract the band gap of black-phosphorus thin-films in an attempt to characterize novel 2D-materials.

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