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Jimmy Zhu

Carnegie Mellon University
Education
Ph.D., Physics, University of California, San Diego, 1989
Profile

Jimmy Zhu received his B.S. in Physics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China and his M.S. and Ph.D., also in Physics, from the University of California at San Diego. He was an assistant professor and later associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota before joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. He received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1993 and the 1996 R&D100 Award for the CPP/GMR read sensor patent, one out of the twelve U.S. patents he currently holds.
 

Research

Dr. Zhu’s research has been in the field of magnetic data storage technologies. His research work on the microstructure of thin film recording media has been pivotal for hard disk drives to reach today’s storage capacity. He has pioneered the research on utilizing micromagnetic modeling for MRAM memory design and established some of the most fundamental design principles used today.
Magnetic Recording Technology for Hard Disk Drives and Digital Tape Recording: Magnetic recording technology has been advancing in dramatically rapid pace over the past decade during which we have made some important contributions. At present, our research includes:
Development of novel recording mechanisms that enables area storage density exceeding 1 Tbits/in^2 for hard disk drive applications;
Development of novel perpendicular thin film media microstructures that capable of high area density applications;The research is supported by DSSC and its industrial sponsors.
Innovative Designs of Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM): MRAM has the potential to replace SRAM, DRAM, FLASH, and even a small disk drive to be the universal memory for computer data storage, enabling an entire computer system to be made on a single chip. Our research focuses on novel MRAM designs that offer robust and repeatable magnetic switching characteristic, low operation power capability, and sufficient thermal-magnetic stability. Micromagnetic modeling on computers is utilized to aid the design process and the devices are fabricated using the state-of-the-art e-beam and optical lithographic fabrication technology. Our collaborators include the Naval Research Laboratory and Nonvolatile Electronics Corporation. This research is current funded by the Office of Naval Research, Pittsburgh Digital Green House, STMicroelectronics, and DSSC.
Understanding Noise in Nano-Magnetic Systems: Thermally excited magnetization precession and spin current induced chaotic spin waves are two important causes of magnetic noise in advanced nano-scale magnetic sensors. We perform both theoretical analysis and experimental measurements to obtain a good understanding of the noise and the corresponding underlying physics. This research is supported by Seagate Technology and DSSC.

Students

Title Position Email
Hoan Ho Graduate Student
Taehee Jeong Graduate Student
Caleb Lille Undergraduate Student clille@andrew.cmu.edu
Wen-Chin Lin Graduate Student
Jeong-Heon Park Graduate Student
Soyoung Park Graduate Student
Vincent Sokalski Graduate Student
Yiming Wang Graduate Student
Most Cited Publications

"Ultrahigh density vertical magnetoresistive random access memory." Jian-Gang Zhu, Youfeng Zheng, Gary A Prinz. Journal of Applied Physics.
"Microwave assisted magnetic recording." Jian-Gang Zhu, Xiaochun Zhu, Yuhui Tang. IEEE Transactions on Magnetics.
"Micromagnetic studies of thin metallic films." Jian‐Gang Zhu, H Neal Bertram. Journal of applied physics.
"Signature microRNA expression profile of essential hypertension and its novel link to human cytomegalovirus infection." Shuqiang Li, Jianguo Zhu, Weili Zhang, Youren Chen, Ke Zhang, Laurentiu M Popescu, Xinliang Ma, Wayne Bond Lau, Rong Rong, Xueqing Yu, Bingbing Wang, Yafeng Li, Chuanshi Xiao, Mingming Zhang, Shuyan Wang, Liping Yu, Alex F Chen, Xinchun Yang, Jun Cai. Circulation.
"Magnetoresistive random access memory: The path to competitiveness and scalability." Jian-Gang Zhu. Proceedings of the IEEE.

Recent Publications

"3d perpendicular magnetic crossbar memory." Jian-Gang Zhu, Chia-Ling Chien, Qinli Ma. US.
"Dynamic Modeling and Feedforward Control of Jaw Movements Driven by Viscoelastic Artificial Muscles." Ujjaval Gupta, Yuzhe Wang, Hongliang Ren, Jian Zhu. IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.
"Construction of electrochemical storage cell." Weixin Zheng, Luxia Jiang, Jianhua Zhu, Xi Shen. US.
"Orthogonal decomposition of core loss along rolling and transverse directions of non-grain oriented silicon steels." Xuezhi Wan, Yongjian Li, Jingsong Li, Chengcheng Liu, Jianguo Zhu. AIP Advances.
"Technique that enhances the manipulation of an HTML tree presentation by using an array representation of the hierarchical path of a tree node." Trevett B Chusing, Lei Zhang, Jian Zhu. US.