Digitimes reports that Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) has been developing spin-orbit torque MRAM (SOT-MRAM) for many years, and is now transferring this technology to local chipmakers in Taiwan.
According to Digitimes , ITRI has established a platform for its SOT-MRAM technology certification and trial runs on 8-inch wafers. The report does not detail which companies are licensing ITRI's technology.
In SOT-MRAM, or spin-orbit torque MRAM, the switching of the free magnetic layer is done by injecting an in-plane current in an adjacent SOT layer, unlike STT-MRAM where the current is injected perpendicularly into the magnetic tunnel junction and the read and write operation is performed through the same path. SOT-MRAM promises to be faster, denser and more efficient. In 2018 researchers from Imec fabricated SOT-MRAM devices on 300mm wafers using CMOS compatible processes, for the first time.
