June 2006

Singulus reports the sale of an additional TIMARIS deposition machine for the production of MRAM semiconductor chips.

Roland Lacher, CEO of Singulus technologies comments: "At the end of previous year the break-through for TIMARIS machines for TMR applications was achieved. This was accomplished with the first order for thin film heads (write/read heads) placed in December 2005. Overall, including today's orders already the fourth machine is earmarked for delivery. This is a great success, since we were able to show that our machines overcame the high entry barriers of the market and holds up well against the competition as well."

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. has been chasing a breakthrough memory technology for many years. It's called MRAM, or magnetic random-access memory, and some experts say the technology has the potential to combine the density of conventional computer memory, or DRAM; the speed of SRAM, or static random-access memory; and the nonvolatility of flash. Freescale may be nearing a significant milestone with MRAM. Analyst Doug Freedman with American Technology Research reported last week that the chip maker had just completed an extensive qualification process for MRAM, which indicates it could be on the verge of making commercial chips with the process.
"This could be a big market opportunity," Freedman wrote. Freescale says it will make an announcement on MRAM in the next few weeks

This story appeared in Statesman, but it's no longer available.

Crocus Technology SA, a startup company specializing in magnetic random access memory, has raised $17 million in a Series A round of financing.

The money would be used to allow Crocus (Grenoble, France) to hire engineers and scientists in process engineering, test and design from Europe and the United States, Sofinnova Ventures said. Crocus also needs money to acquire specialized equipment to enable the company to complete a first memory test vehicle within 12 months and its first commercial product shortly thereafter, Sofinnova added.

n an interview for HPCwire, Professor Thomas Sterling says that MRAM is one of the most promising material expected to replace silicon for supercomputing chip production. From the interview: "The most likely replacement for silicon is silicon; and by that I mean new semiconductor materials incorporating silicon. Beyond that, my personal opinion is that the most promising technologies likely to enhance the use of advanced silicon technologies are: a) chip to chip optical interconnects, b) Wafer-scale technology, but this has to have built-in fault tolerance, otherwise low yields will kill it. c) Niobium RSFQ super-conductive technology; this is unpopular, but the power benefits at higher clock rates are significant. And d) MRAM - magnetic RAM for low power, high density storage. There is also the possibility of new packaging techniques that may greatly increase density, such as 3-D structures; but this assumes we can get the heat out. In each of these cases we have enough proof of concept experiments in laboratory tests to demonstrate their promise Using fiber optics one can deliver close to one Terabit per second rates and super-conductive material can clock at in excess of 700 GHz. RSFQ was cited in a previous ITRS report by the SIA as a potential future technology.