MRAM production

Everspin issued a PR today announcing a 300% growth in product shipment in 2011 - with 250 new design wins. Everspin actually revealed this information last week at CES. Everspin says that the enterprise storage, server and networking segment was the fastest growing segment during the year (Everspin's "traditinal" markets are the industrial, energy and automotive and transportation markets).

The company further revealed that a number of leading vendors in this segment are using MRAM for critical data storage in RAID systems, servers and routers. Both Dell and LSI are using Everspin's chips in their RAID controllers.

Everspin had a presentation at CES 2012, in which they gave some interesting new details. The company has shipped over 4 million MRAM chips to date, and they expect to ship over 5 million in 2012 (this is based on design wins in 2011). They have over 300 customers and over 250 design wins. Everspin further says that currently there are over 100 MRAM products on the market.

You can view the entire slide show here

Crocus is a startup company that develops MRAM technology - and recently they have announced several exciting advances in both their technology and their financing and production plans. We had the good chance to interview Barry Hoberman, Crocus' chief marketing officer.

Q: Barry, thanks for agreeing to answer our questions... The big story today is still RUSNANO's $125 million investment - announced in May 2011. Any updates on this deal? Have the construction begun on the Russian plant?

A: The site selection for our Russian plant (Crocus Nano Electronics) has been completed. The site contains an existing shell, which will be modified to support the clean room. Crocus expects to process wafers at this facility in 2013.

Crocus signed a technology development and wafer manufacturing agreement with China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC). The two companies will develop high-temperature Magnetic Logic Unit (MLU) technology targeted at automotive applications. The base wafer processing will be done by SMIC and these wafers will be further processed by Crocus at a facility that has yet to be built in Russia.

In addition the MLU technology could be licensed to SMIC for use in embedded chip applications and the two companies plan to market jointly smart cards made using TAS MLU and MRAM technology.

Singulus Technologies says that in the past couple of months they have noticed "increased activities in the area of MRAM memory by large semiconductor companies". The company expects MRAM development to progress and they consider themselves to be in an exceptional starting position for the upcoming growth market of MRAM memory. Their TIMARIS vacuum coating machines are already used by customers to develop MRAM wafers.

Kiyoshi Kobayashi, president of Toshiba's Semiconductor and Storage Products Company, said that "MRAMs will make it possible to take further advantage of NAND flash memories and HDDs, whose access performances are low,". It seems that Toshiba plans to use MRAM as cache for both NAND and HDDs devices.

Toshiba hasn't given up on the idea of having a full MRAM memory device - replacing HDD/NAND/DRAM altogether, but using it as a cache can be a step towards this goal.

Toshiba and Hynix announced an agreement to jointly develop MRAM products. Once the development is complete, the companies intend to establish an MRAM production plant together. We believe the companies intend to develop STT-MRAM technology.

Toshiba has been developing STT-MRAM for quite some time, and just a few days ago reported a breakthrough MTJ device that could pave the way towards Gigabit MRAM devices. They expect such chips within 3-4 years, so that's probably the same time frame on the new JV with Hynix.