Epitaxial Growth of Large-Scale 2D CrTe2 Films on Amorphous Silicon Wafers With Low Thermal Budget.

2D van der Waals (vdW) magnets open landmark horizons in the development of innovative spintronic device architectures. However, their fabrication with large scale poses challenges due to high synthesis temperatures (>500 °C) and difficulties in integrating them with standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology on amorphous substrates such as silicon oxide (SiO2) and silicon nitride (SiNx). Here, a seeded growth technique for crystallizing CrTe2 films on amorphous SiNx/Si and SiO2/Si substrates with a low thermal budget is presented. This fabrication process optimizes large-scale, granular atomic layers on amorphous substrates, yielding a substantial coercivity of 11.5 kilo-oersted, attributed to weak intergranular exchange coupling. Field-driven Néel-type stripe domain dynamics explain the amplified coercivity. Moreover, the granular CrTe2 devices on Si wafers display significantly enhanced magnetoresistance, more than doubling that of single-crystalline counterparts. Current-assisted magnetization switching, enabled by a substantial spin-orbit torque with a large spin Hall angle (85) and spin Hall conductivity (1.02 × 107 ℏ/2e Ω⁻¹ m⁻¹), is also demonstrated. These observations underscore the proficiency in manipulating crystallinity within integrated 2D magnetic films on Si wafers, paving the way for large-scale batch manufacturing of practical magnetoelectronic and spintronic devices, heralding a new era of technological innovation.

Electronic imitation of behavioral and psychological synaptic activities using TiOx/Al2O3-based memristor devices.

Seeking an effective electronic synapse to emulate biological synaptic behavior is fundamental for building brain-inspired computers. An emerging two-terminal memristor, in which the conductance can be gradually modulated by external electrical stimuli, is widely considered as the strongest competitor of the electronic synapse. Here, we show the capability of TiOx/Al2O3-based memristor devices to imitate synaptic behaviors. Along with analog resistive switching performances, the devices replicate the bio-synapse behaviors of potentiation/depression, short-term-plasticity, and long-term-potentiation, which show that TiOx/Al2O3-based memristors may be useful as electronic synapses. The essential memorizing capabilities of the brain are dependent on the connection strength between neurons, and the memory types change from short-term memory to long-term memory. In the TiOx/Al2O3-based electronic synaptic junction, the memorizing levels can change their state via a standard rehearsal process and also via newly introduced process called "impact of event" i.e. the impact of pulse amplitude, and the width of the input pulse. The devices show a short-term to long-term memory effect with the introduction of intermediate mezzanine memory. The experimental achievements using the TiOx/Al2O3 electronic synapses are finally psychologically modeled by considering the mezzanine level. It is highly recommended that similar phenomena should be investigated for other memristor systems to check the authenticity of this model.