STT-MRAM - Page 13

Everspin Technologies announced that it closed a $29 million funding round, led by Global Foundries and Western Digital Capital. Existing investors (New Venture Partners, Lux Capital, Sigma Partners, Epic Ventures, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson) also joined in the round.

In October 2014 Everspin entered into a partnership with GlobalFoundries to build fully processed 300mm wafers with Everspin's ST-MRAM technology. In October it was announced that GF acquired a stake in Everspin (this is probably before this recent investment) and also acquired ST-MRAM processing equipment (40-nm).

In October 2011, Micron and Singapore's A*STAR Data Storage Institute (DSI) announced a 3-year STT-MRAM co-development project. Today they announced that they extend this collaboration for three more years.

DSI and Micro are co-developing high-density STT-MRAM devices. Micron established a technology centre in Singapore, with help from the DSI, which also provided the necessary expertise and innovation to achieve successful fabrication of STT-MRAM devices. In the next three years, the research collaboration will focus on developing low-power consumption switching mechanisms, and improving the performance of STT-MRAM devices.

Everspin Technologies entered into a partnership with GlobalFoundries to build fully processed 300mm wafers with Everspin's ST-MRAM technology, starting with GF's 28-nm and 40-nm low-power CMOS platforms. As part of the agreement, GlobalFoundries invested an undisclosed amount in Everspin, and they already acquired ST-MRAM processing equipment (40-nm).

Everspin hopes that the new agreement will help drive ST-MRAM adoption and will offer higher volume production at lower cost. The company reports that they shipped over 40 million MRAM chips - which represents very fast growth as in August 2013 they reported selling 10 million MRAM chips so they sold almost 30 million chips in just over a year (it took them over 4 years to sell the first 10 million).

A few days ago I reported that TDK will show a new STT-MRAM prototype, and now we have some more information and a couple of photos of the new test chip. TDK is showing their first STT-MRAM chip, a 8Mb device, produced on a 8" silicon substrate. 

This is the first time TDK exposed their STT-MRAM technology. Those MRAM chips were produced by TDK's Headway Technologies. TDK will not mass poroduce MRAM chips themselves but rather seek a chip-making partner to produce them. But this may take a while: TDK says it could be up to 10 years before the technology matures (earlier reports said TDK estimates that it will take 3 years to commercialize this technology).

According to a report from Japan, TDK Corp is going to present a prototype 8-Mbit STT-MRAM device today at Ceatec Japan 2014. The MRAM was produced on a 8" silicon substrate. Hopefully TDK will give more details on this achievement later today.

The report further says that TDK aims to commercialize STT-MRAM chips in 3-5 years.

Researchers from the A*STAR institute in Singapore suggest a new design that could make STT-MRAM devices faster. Using a computational model, the researchers tried different designs for the relative orientation of the magnetic fields in both MRAM layers (the 'field-like' term).

The strength of the 'field-like' term depends on the device geometry and the materials used. Devices with a strong field-like term has a greater potential to reduce switching times than for devices in which the field-like term is negligible.

Here's an interesting video interview with Joe O'Hare, Everspin's Director of Product Marketing. Joe explains the company's MRAM (and ST-MRAM) tech and business, especially how it relates to enterprise SSD, which seems to be the focus of MRAM applications at the moment:

During the interview, Joe updates that everspin is now designing a 256Mb chip, and this will be the next product the company will introduce. Currently their highest-density chip is the 64Mb ST-MRAM chip (announced in 2012, but only ramped-up recently).

Everspin announced the world's first STT-MRAM chip back in 2012, and they started offering it to customers in 2013. So far we only heard of a single product that actually uses those chips: Buffalo Memory's S6C industrial SATA III SSD. Today Everspin announced it is ramping up production, and the company disclosed several new customer and ecosystem relationships.

Everspin is collaborating with FPGA leader Altera, and is showcasing three new customers: SMART Modular Technologies, Mobiveil and Mangstor. SMART Modular is demonstrating a PCIe-based, high speed, and persistent FPGA-based memory solution using Everspin's STT-MRAM chips. SMART are using Evespin's EMD3D064M 64Mb DDR3 ST-MRAM chips. Mangstor unveiled the MX6000 family of Intelligent Storage Devices that use Everspin's ST-MRAM chips.

Toshiba developed new STT-MRAM technology that can be used to enable MRAM based cache memory for microprocessors. The L2 cache alone uses about 80% of the power consumed by the CPU, so reducing the power consumption of the cache is very important - and STT-MRAM may reduce this consumption by about 60%. It's not clear how close is this technology to actually being commercialized.

Toshiba's new STT-MRAM uses a dual-cell (2T-2MTJ) circuit in which the two MTJs have complementary resistive states (high and low resistive states). This eliminates the leak path and also increases the readout signal intensity - and so improves access speed. In Toshiba's cahce, the read time is 4.1 ns - very close to that of SRAM, while the write time (2.1ns) is similar to SRAM. Toshiba also implemented error correction mechanisms into the cache STT-MRAM chip.

Last month we reported that Avalanche Technology has been awarded four key "milestone" patents for its STT-MRAM technology and solid-state storage array system design. Today the company announced that it has been awarded four new STT-MRAM patents in areas of Perpendicular STT-MRAM and MRAM Integration and Manufacturing. Avalanche has over 200 filed patents that covers the full spectrum from memory cell/circuit design and manufacturing to solid-state storage system development and deployment.

The company has been awarded three key patents in the area of Perpendicular STT-MRAM: