Everspin Technologies Inc. (Chandler, Ariz.) built its business as a magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) company through industrial and automotive applications, but it’s always been looking at broader applications for both its MRAM and Spin-Torque MRAM (ST-MRAM), particularly for applications that require data persistence and integrity, low latency, and security.

Now its MRAM has found its way into the M.2 form factor as part of Aupera Technologies' (Vancouver, BC) All Flash Array. The AupM001 is an M.2 MRAM module designed with Everspin’s EMD3D064M ST-MRAM. Its initial capacity is 32 MB, with higher capacities becoming available soon, said Everspin president and CEO Phill LoPresti in a telephone interview with EE Times. “We feel this is right in the sweet spot we targeted the products for when we started development."

Aupera’s All Flash Array is equipped with Everspin’s, 64 Mb DDR3 ST-MRAM devices and a PCIe backhaul interface, he said, and this is the first time the M.2 form factor has been used to house MRAM. To date, the M.2 standard has been used for either SATA or PCI Express (PCIe) SSDs, having replaced the mSATA standard. LoPresti said the smaller form factor also means smaller connections and is appealing to companies that are building storage arrays, such as Aupera. MRAM is being used as a buffer for write caches, rather than DRAM, and it’s becoming an additional tier of persistent, high performance memory. It can also be used as buffer memory instead of low density DRAM or as I/O and network cache instead of an NV-DRAM.

The Everspin’s MRAM in AupM001's flash array system is used for parity check and as a hardware accelerated engine for specific applications that require low latency and high performance, said Roy Liao, founder and CEO of Aupera, in a phone interview with EE Times. He said M.2 is becoming an increasingly popular form factor, particularly for modular systems, while Aupera’s experience in the market is that customers are perfectly comfortable with MRAM being used where it makes sense, even though MRAM is still considered an emerging memory by many.

Other companies that have incorporated Everspin’s MRAM into enterprise storage include Mangstor, an NVMe SSD supplier which uses the company’s EMD3D064M ST-MRAM in its line of storage devices for accelerating enterprise and cloud computing workloads.

In a report released last year, research firm Coughlin Associates predicted MRAM was poised for a 50% compound annual growth rate, with MRAM and STT-MRAM revenue increasing from about $190 million in 2013 to $2.1 billion in 2019, with one of its most appealing aspects being its compatibility with CMOS processes. The firm’s founder, Tom Coughlin, told EE Times last month the report was due for an update soon.

Until recently, Everspin was the only company actually producing MRAM, but last month, Avalanche Technology (Fremont, Calif.) announced it was sampling what is said are the industry’s first Spin Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) chips in the form of a 32/64Mbit stand-alone discrete STT-MRAM memory device with an industry standard SPI interface built on a 55nm-node foundry process.

By: DocMemory
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