MRAM production - Page 5

Everspin announced that its perpendicular (pMTJ) STT-MRAM memory is going to be deployed by Global Foundries as an embedded 22nm memory. Everspin licensed its technology global foundries which will offer this as part of its 22FDX platform.

The 22FDX platform targets emerging applications such as battery powered consumer devices, IoT, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Vision Processing. Customers of Global Foundries will now be able to embed MRAM memory in next-generation SoC and MCU based producers.

Everspin announced that it has started shipping samples based on its perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction (pMTJ) ST-MRAM. The first chip is the EMD3D256MB - a 256Mb DDR device. This is Everspin's 3rd-gen MRAM technology.

The pMTJ ST-MRAM offers improved performance, higher endurance, lower power, and better scalability compared to previous MRAM and ST-MRAM products. The company (together with GlobalFoundries) is now focused on the production ramp of the 256Mb MRAM and is working on a scaled-down 1Gb version.

Everspin announced that it started shipping 256Mb ST-MRAM samples to customers. Everspin also plans to increase the density and sample 1Gb ST-MRAM chips later this year. The new chips demonstrate interface speeds comparable to DRAM, with DDR3 and DDR4 interfaces. Volume production is expected "soon".

The new EMD3D256 chips are based on Everspin's proprietary magnetic tunnel junction (pMTJ) spin torque technology - and the company expects the new technology to enable it to produce ST-MRAM in lower geometries - and higher densities beyond 1Gb in the future.

Everspin announced a new MRAM chip, the MR10Q010 - a 1Mb QSPI MRAM. Everspin says that at 104 Mhz, this is features the fastest non-volatile write speeds in the industry. The MR10Q010 is now available in both SOIC and BGA packages.

Everspin says that the new chip is suitable for applications such as enterprise RAID controllers - that can use the MR10Q010 as a journal memory that records continuously updated system metadata.

Everspin launched two new MRAM chips for the automotive market. The first chip is a 16Mb one, that can operate in a wide temperature range (-40 to 125 Celsius) and comes in both x8 and x16 IO configurations. The new chip features fast 45 ns read and write cycle times in a parallel asynchronous SRAM-like interface.

The second chip is a 128Kb SPI MRAM in both the Grade 1 and Grade 3 (-40C to 105 Celsius) ranges. This serial interface MRAM fits in a low pin count DFN package with 8 pins.

A new report from Coughlin Associates says that in the near future we will see dramatic changes in the memory market as as fast non-volatile memories augment and eventually replace volatile memory.

MRAM (and STT-MRAM) annual shipping capacity will rise from 240TB in 2014 to between 15 and 35 PB in 2020. MRAM and STT-RAM revenues are expected to increase from about $300 million in 2014 to between $1.35 and $3.15 billion by 2020.

STT-MRAM developer Avalanche Technology announced that it began to sample STT-MRAM chips. Avalanche's proprietary perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction (pMTJ) cells are manufactured in a high volume, low cost, standard CMOS 300mm process.

Those first sample chips are 32Mbit and 64Mbit in size, and offer an industry-standard SPI interface built on a 55nm-node foundry process. Avalanche is also offering its STT-MRAM technology (which they brand as AvRAM) under license as embedded memory for integrated SOC designs.

Yole Developpement released a new emerging-memory market report in which they try to asses the future of the memory market. Yose says that Phase-change memory (PCM) is pretty much dead, and the two main emerging memory technologies are MRAM and Resistive random Access Memory (ReRAM or RRAM).

While RRAM is very promising in the near future, with support from Micron (they plan to release RRAM chips in 2015) and Panasonic while other players are expected to react quickly. RRAM and STT-MRAM will compete in 2015-2016 in some standalone markets (such as embedded MCU, wearables and smart cards and the storage class memory for enterprise storage which will be the biggest market), and it's not clear yet which technology will be the most popular.

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).