The higher magnetoresistance of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) material offers potential improvements for Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM), magnetoresistive read heads, and magnetic field sensors. Other material properties besides magnetoresistance are important for these applications. Saturation field, linearity, hysterisis, sheet resistivity, magnetostriction, and other factors can impact the utility of GMR materials in applications. These factors are compared for several GMR structures: magnetic sandwiches and multilayers, antiferromagnetic-coupled and ''uncoupled'' sandwiches and multilayers, vertical GMR multilayers, and granular films. This is still an emerging technical field, but at this time, the most promising GMR materials for low field applications are ''uncoupled'' sandwiches and low antiferromagnetic coupled multilayers using in-plane conduction, and they can be superior to anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) materials and Hall effect devices for many applications.
