The IEDM 2016 conference, held in early December in San Francisco, was somewhat of a coming-out party for magneto-resistive memory (MRAM). The MRAM presentations at IEDM were complemented by a special MRAM-focused poster session – organized by the IEEE Magnetics Society in cooperation with the IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) – with 33 posters and a lively crowd.

And in the opening keynote speech of the 62nd International Electron Devices Meeting, Seok-hee Lee, executive vice president at SK Hynix (Seoul), set the stage by saying that the race is on between DRAM and emerging memories such as MRAM. “Originally, people thought that DRAM scaling would stop. Then engineers in the DRAM and NAND worlds worked hard and pushed out the end further in the future,” he said.

While cautioning that MRAM bit cells are larger than in DRAM and thus more more costly, Lee said MRAM has “very strong potential in embedded memory.”

SK Hynix is not the only company with a full-blown MRAM development effort underway. Samsung, which earlier bought MRAM startup Grandis and which has a materials-related research relationship with IBM, attracted a standing-room-only crowd to its MRAM paper at IEDM. TSMC is working with TDK on its program, and Sony is using 300mm wafers to build high-performance MRAMs for startup Avalanche Technology.

And one knowledgeable source said “the biggest processor company also has purchased a lot of equipment” for its MRAM development effort.

Dave Eggleston, vice president of emerging memory at GlobalFoundries, said he believes GlobalFoundries is the furthest along on the MRAM optimization curve, partly due to its technology and manufacturing partnership with Everspin Technologies (Chandler, Ariz.). Everspin has been working on MRAM for more than 20 years, and has shipped nearly 60 million discrete MRAMs, largely to the cache buffering and industrial markets.

GlobalFoundries has announced plans to use embedded STT-MRAM in its 22FDX platform, which uses fully-depleted SOI technology, as early as 2018.

Future versions of MRAM– such as spin orbit torque (SOT) MRAM and Voltage Controlled MRAM — could compete with SRAM and DRAM. Analysts said today’s spin-transfer torque STT-MRAM – referring to the torque that arises from the transfer of electron spins to the free magnetic layer — is vying for commercial adoption as ever-faster processors need higher performance memory subsystems.

STT-MRAM is fast enough to fit in as a new memory layer below the processor and the SRAM-based L1/L2 cache layers, and above DRAM and storage-level NAND flash layers, said Gary Bronner, vice president of research at Rambus Inc.

With good data retention and speed, and medium density, MRAM “may have advantages in the lower-level caches” of systems which have large amounts of on-chip SRAM, Bronner said, due in part to MRAM’s smaller cell size than six-transistor SRAM. While DRAM in the sub-20nm nodes faces cost issues as its moves to more complex capacitor structures, Bronner said that “thus far STT-MRAM) is not cheaper than DRAM.”

IBM researchers, which pioneered the spin-transfer torque approach to MRAM, are working on a high-performance MRAM technology which could be used in servers.

As of now, MRAM density is limited largely by the size of the transistors required to drive sufficient current to the magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) to flip its magnetic orientation. Dan Edelstein, an IBM fellow working on MRAM development at IBM Research, said “it is a tall order for MRAM to replace DRAM. But MRAM could be used in system-level memory architectures and as an embedded memory technology.”

By: DocMemory
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