Interfacial properties and their impact on magnetic tunnel junction at microwave frequencies.

An equivalent model for MgO-based magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) is used to characterize the frequency behavior of MTJs up to 20 GHz in this paper. From the extracted parasitic factor of MTJ, we found that the parasitic components (beside the junction resistance) significantly yield adverse effect, especially at microwave frequencies. Full parametric studies show that the interfacial capacitance, rather than the geometric capacitance, plays a key role in the drop of efficiency in microwave frequency applications of MTJs. Interfacial resistance engineering is proposed as a solution to improve the parasitic factor, as well as the operation frequency of MTJ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]