USA MRAM Forum this week gave interesting insights into the latest developments and expectations for solid state memory and storage technologies. Tom Coughlin is president of Coughlin Associates.

MRAM technology appears to be poised for adoption in discrete and embedded electronic products for many applications. According to a report this year by Coughlin Associates, the total available market for MRAM devices is projected to reach over $2 B by 2019.   MRAM technology would provide a non-volatile memory replacement for fast but volatile static and dynamic RAM (SRAM and DRAM). These products are geared for important discrete as well as embedded memory applications. There are several companies working on these MRAM products including Avalanche, Crocus, EverSpin, Samsung and Toshiba Toshiba. See below for a picture of a STT MRAM memory cell.

According to EverSpin Technologies, who presented at the Canon event and said that they had shipped over 40 M MRAM devices, MRAM applications include energy and metering, PLC automation, industrial control systems, RAID controllers, professional audio and automotive. MRAM technologies appears poised to show up in FPGAs from Altera Altera and in HDD and flash memory based storage devices introduced by companies such as Smart Modular Technologies, Buffalo and in products using the NVMe and PCIe interfaces.

While challenges remain for ramping spin tunnel torque (STT) and related advanced MRAM technologies it is clear from the discussions at the IEDM as well as at the Canon Forum that many companies are involved in development of devices with low power capability and demonstrated endurance and speed.   At the IEDM IMEC spoke about sub-20 nm MRAM for embedded memory applications and Samsung discussed challenges for creating Tera-bit-level STT MRAM.

This product development activity is driving the creation of manufacturing and testing tools and processes that will allow ramping MRAM production. Canon reveiled a roadmap at their Forum showing equipment and processes for volume production ramp of MRAM by 2016.

Resistive random access memory (RRAM) is another promising solid-state storage technology with the potential for displacing NAND flash memory sometime in the future. IEDM papers by Micron Technologies and Adesto Technologies looked at factors important in designing low noise and high endurance RRAM devices. Stanford announced a 3D chip architecture that combined logic layers on top of memory layers allowing very fast transport of information between the processing elements and the memory.

Tohoku University was showing a similar 3D processor architecture where MRAM layers were combined with logic layers. Other development at the IEDM conference were a 16 GB RRAM paper from Micron, a flexible SONOS non-volatile memory from KAIST, a new version of phase change memory called Topologically Switching RAM (TRAM) and the use of porous silicon in a chip as a super capacitor to provide power to finish writing to non-volatile memories. Not all of these interesting technologies will make it to market, but they show important developments in non-volatile memory.

It is our expectation that todays volatile memories will be replaced by non-volatile memories in most applications within 10 years, resulting in major power savings, faster boot ups and new capabilities. With MRAM there is a possibility that with a move away from current to spin based circuits that processing and memory can be combined in the same device, creating even greater capabilities.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved