Patent ID: 7861401

Claim:
A method of forming a high performance tunneling magnetoresistive (TMR) element, comprising: (a) forming a TMR stack of layers on a substrate, said TMR stack comprising: (1) a pinned layer having a synthetic anti-parallel (SyAP) configuration represented by AP2/coupling/AP1 in which AP2 is an outer portion of the pinned layer and AP1 is an inner portion of the pinned layer with a coupling layer therebetween, said AP1 layer is a composite CoFe X B Y /CoFe Z layer wherein x and y represent the atomic % of Fe and B, respectively, in a lower CoFeB layer and z is the atomic % of Fe in an upper CoFe layer; (2) an oxygen surfactant layer (OSL) formed on said AP1 layer; and (3) a tunnel barrier layer on the oxygen surfactant layer; and (b) patterning said TMR stack to form a TMR element.