Altis was given responsibility for turning MRAM research at Infineon and IBM into products in May 2003, but early indications had been that Infineon wanted to go to market with a much larger device.

But soon after Altis took responsibility for MRAM development Motorola SPS, now undergoing a name change to Freescale as part of a spin-off from Motorola Inc., began sampling 4-Mbit MRAM devices in the fourth quarter of 2003.

In a conversation with Silicon Strategies Eckstein, who had come to Paris to speak at the International Stategy Symposium Europe organized by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International, declined to acknowledge that Motorola's Semiconductor Product Sector was in the lead in MRAM technology.

"Motorola may be sampling but they have a smaller memory," Eckstein told Silicon Strategies. Altis has a "16-Mbit device coming soon," she added.

Prior to transferring the MRAM technology to Altis the intention — at least at Infineon — had been to debut with a commercial device much closer to the leading edge in memory capacity at 128-Mbit or 256-Mbit, in contrast to Motorola's 4-Mbit offering that is intended as a pathfinder for embedded MRAM applications. However, the plan was not re-confirmed at the time Altis took over MRAM development.

It is not clear whether Altis still intends to go into volume production with a larger device and is using the 16-Mbit device to counter Motorola's claims of a leadership position, or has responded to customer requests for a smaller memory.

MRAM is one of several candidates as a "universal memory" technology offering the combination of non-volatility and high-speed random access, and which once mature could displace many established forms of solid-state memory.

By: DocMemory
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