Advanced thin-film growth technology has made it possible to arrange different materials at the atomic level and to fabricate thin-film structures (e.g., GMR) with strong quantum effects. GMR devices appear in two important areas of storage technology: GMR sensors for magnetic read heads, and Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM). The former is a well-established commercial technology, in which nanoscale thermal transport is related to reliability, through electrostatic discharge (ESD) events as well as performance. In MRAM, the nanoscale thermal transport limits device ultimate performance, but may also present an opportunity for assisted switching. The thermal transport properties of these thin periodic layers play an important role in design, performance and reliability of these devices, which are fundamentally different from their bulk counterparts [1,2].
Calorimetry is the process of quantifying internal energy changes as a result of temperature changes, in which enthalpy is a measure of the internal energy. Differential calorimetry has been around for about half a century and has been primarily adopted to eliminate the unknown sources of heat losses from the “test” structure by introducing a “reference” structure, e.g. [1]. Over the past decade, the need for small-scale measurements have led to the development of MEMS based differential calorimetry techniques, e.g. [2], which is an ideal platform to satisfy the requirements for fabrication of identical “reference” and “test” structures. However, one should be cautious that the “identical” geometry and dimension are only the required but not necessarily the sufficient condition, in this approach. Indeed, the necessary and sufficient condition to achieve the highest resolution and accuracy is for the “test” and “reference” structures to have identical thermal “footprint” and “behavior”.
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