MRAM Chips Arrive in Market

AUSTIN, TEXAS: Freescale has announced that they've gone into volume production of a 4Mbit (256K x 16-bit) MRAM chip. The newly announced MR2A16A MRAM part had been in development for a decade and was sampled back in 2004. It has already attracted a number of buyers and is expected to start showing up in products soon.

Before Freescale, Motorola was also reported covering a couple of Motorola demonstrations of working MRAM chips. At the time, IBM, Infineon, Motorola, and the legion of twenty or so other companies that have been working on this technology were projecting that the first MRAM products would hit the market in 2004.

Freescale Semiconductor will commercially offer a new type of memory chip, in hopes of spurring the development of applications and devices that can capitalize on the inherent advantages of the technology.

Freescale is the first semiconductor company to begin selling memory chips based on MRAM (Magnetoresistive RAM), a technology that uses magnetic attraction to create resistance that is identified in the chip as a one or a zero.

The new chips could be used by computer makers to enable instantaneous startup, said Andreas Wild, director of technology solutions in Europe, Middle East and Africa for Freescale. The technology would replace the active memory that is currently used to speed up the startup process, he said.

MRAM also will replace some other types of memory like flash and EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable ROM) that suffer from limited endurance, he said. Those technologies use an insulator within the chip that sustains damage through use and so the chips can only support reprogramming a limited number of times, he said. MRAM, however, doesn't sustain that same type of damage with use so it can support unlimited reprogramming, Wild said.

“Nobody wanted to engage in the development of applications and products if there would not be the security of supply," Wild said. “In order to solve this circle, we decided we will put something on the market that would be mature and reliable to stimulate development."

However, the low memory capacity in the new Freescale chips may be one example of such a shortcoming. Gordon says it's unlikely that MRAM can catch up to the gigabytes of storage supported by other memory technologies and required by many consumer electronics.

Wild says that Freescale has demonstrated that the memory capacity is scalable and that with each new generation of the chip capacity will double, allowing MRAM to catch up with other available memory technologies.