Motorola Labs, in partnership with Motorola SPS's DigitalDNA Laboratories, disclosed what it says is an industry milestone in developing MRAM (magnetoresistive random access memory). Speaking at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference, the company said that this universal memory has the potential to revolutionise the $48 bn semiconductor memory market and offers an array of innovative, affordable memory-based applications for digital consumers worldwide.
"We believe Motorola is ready to lead the industry, as the first company to demonstrate and successfully process 256 K MRAM chips," said Padmasree Warrior, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector.
Consumer benefits of the revolutionary memory chip technology could be huge - eliminating pet peeves such as slow computer or cellphone start-up, data loss, long waits for data to load and short battery life. For example, today's computers need to reload information into local memory from the hard disk drive when power is turned on. In the future this should not be necessary. MRAM is designed to allow the programs and data to remain in the local memory, even when the power is off. Similarly, MRAM is expected to eliminate the delay we see today when we power our cellphones on and off.
Another key advantage of MRAM is that the technology is designed to allow the integration of multiple memory options within a chip. This can help to eliminate the need and expense of multiple memories, while enabling reduced equipment size and the ability to offer consumers new, cost-effective memory-based functions and applications in 'smart' products.
"Wireless equipment providers require high-performance 'data crunching' memory and nonvolatile storage which retains information when power is removed. MRAM is engineered to combine both functions into one technology at a fraction of the power," said Omid Tahernia, Vice President and GM, Wireless Communications Division. "In addition, unlike known FeRAM (ferro-electric) technologies, MRAM has a nondestructive read which is designed to significantly increase endurance since re-writes are not required."
MRAM's benefits also extend to transportation where MRAM has the potential to supply the critical memory requirements of automotive systems. Electronics in future 'smart cars' need to have fast, but cost-effective memories that are ideally nonvolatile and capable of large numbers of read and write cycles. Semico Research predicts that MRAM's fast read and write speed, combined with unlimited read and write cycles and cost advantages, has the potential to replace a large portion of today's existing memory technologies, including Flash and DRAM.
The memory successfully demonstrated by Motorola is a 256 Kb nonvolatile MRAM based on a memory cell defined by a single transistor (1T) and a single Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) with read and write cycles of less than 50 ns. The memory organisation is 16 K x 16, and the measured read power consumption is 24 mW at 3 V.
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version