  We present a computationally efficient transferable single-band tight-binding
model (SBTB) for spin polarized transport in heterostructures with an effort to
capture the band structure effects. As an example, we apply it to study
transport through Fe-MgO-Fe(100) magnetic tunnel junction devices. We propose a
novel approach to extract suitable tight-binding parameters for a material by
using the energy resolved transmission as the benchmark, which inherently has
the bandstructure effects over the two dimensional transverse Brillouin zone.
The SBTB parameters for each of the four symmetry bands for bcc Fe(100) are
first proposed which are complemented with the transferable tight-binding
parameters for the MgO tunnel barrier for the Delta_1 and Delta_5 bands. The
non-equilibrium Green's function formalism is then used to calculate the
transport. Features like I-V characteristics, voltage dependence and the
barrier width dependence of the tunnel magnetoresistance ratio are captured
quantitatively and the trends match well with the ones observed by ab initio
methods.
