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.Â
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).
TDK was also showing the same chip alongside a NOR FLASH memory device, showing that the STT-MRAM reads/writes data about 7 times faster than the flash memory.
Everspin is already producing 64Mb ST-MRAM chips (announced in 2012, but only ramped-up recently), and they are currently developing a 256-Mbit STT-MRAM chip.