Will future Macs have MRAM?

Posted by Dennis Sellers Aug 30, 2005 at 1:06am

MRAM (magnetoresistive random access memory) is the first radically new memory technology to show real commercial promise for many years, according to a report by the Research and Markets firm.

MRAM is already being commercialized, and Research and Markets says it’s becoming one of the first complex nano-engineered products to hit the marketplace. There are approximately 15 actual and likely suppliers of MRAM including Freescale, and less well-known start-ups.

According to Freescale—the microprocessor spinoff of Motorola that makes PowerPC G4 chips for some Macs—MRAM combines the best attributes of the three major memories—density of eDRAM, the speed of eSRAM and the non-volatility of Flash—onto a “single” chip. MRAM uses magnetic moments, rather than an electric charge, to determine the on-off state of the memory bit cell. It allows a single memory solution to replace multiple memory options within one chip, helping to enable faster, lower power, more cost-effective solutions for next-generation wireless, as well as other memory-intensive products, according to Freescale.

MRAM is a method of storing data bits using magnetic charges instead of the electrical charges used by DRAM (dynamic random access memory). By combining the high speed of static RAM and the high density of DRAM, proponents say MRAM could be used to significantly improve electronic products by storing greater amounts of data, enabling it to be accessed faster while consuming less battery power than existing electronic memory, according to info at the TechTarget Web site.

“Conventional random access memory (RAM) computer chips store information as long as electricity flows through them,” TechTarget notes. “Once power is turned off, the information is lost unless it has been copied to a hard drive or floppy disk. MRAM, however, retains data after a power supply is cut off. Replacing DRAM with MRAM could prevent data loss and enable computers that start instantly, without waiting for software to boot up.”

Freescale—which has more than 100 U.S. patents on MRAM, more than any other semiconductor company—successfully demonstrated a 1MB nonvolatile, low-power MRAM chip with read and write cycles of less than 50ns in 2002. The following year the company announced the chip and sampled it to a select group of customers in the largest MRAM demonstration in the industry to date—and the first to be integrated with CMOS using copper interconnect technology. A 4MB chip was sampled to a number of customers in 2004.

Since MRAM combines nonvolatility, endurance, speed and density, it has the potential to function as a universal memory in many applications and eliminates the need to combine memories. Consumer electronics, automobiles and PCs are examples of the potential uses of MRAM. In applications where the speed of microprocessors is limited by the bottleneck of data transfer between nonvolatile memory and processor chips, MRAM is designed to remove the bottleneck by placing the high-speed nonvolatile memory directly in communications with the microprocessor, according to Freescale.

What’s more, MRAM is expected to have better write characteristics because it does not require high-voltage programming required for nonvolatile Flash. It will offer “instant on” capability and is expected to reduce the battery power drain for portable electronic devices because it doesn’t require refresh. Because MRAM is easily integrated with conventional CMOS, single-chip solutions, Freescale says it will reduce the cost of multichip memory/processor applications.

Other companies are also involved. In June 2004, Infineon unveiled a 16-Mbit prototype based on 0.18. Production in larger quantities of MRAM chips is expected this year.

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