A research team from Northwestern Engineering, led by Prof. Pedram Khalili developed highly efficiency nanoscale perpendicular MRAM (pMTJ) devices that use sub-volt switching. The researcher say that this new technology can allow scaling MRAM to very high densities.

The new devices are referred to as voltage-controlled MRAM (VCM), that does not rely on current like regular MRAM devices. Most VCM devices need high switching voltage (at least 2 volts), but by using a new material structure with significantly higher sensitivity of the magnetic properties to voltage, the researchers were able to operate at less than one volt.

pMTJ STT-MRAM developer Avalanche Technology announced plans to start producing some of its MRAM devices at LA Semiconductor, a US-based mixed-signal foundry at Pocatello ID (a former onsemi site) with its 180 nm mixed signal and power process capabilities.

Avalanche Technology says that by moving its production  to the US, it shows its commitment to the local aerospace and defense community with an assured source of domestic manufacturing.

Everspin Technologies announced reported its financial results for Q3 2022, with revenues of $15.2 million (close to the end of its guidance, and up 3% from last year) and a net income of $1.9 million.

Everspin says that its product backlog remains strong, but customer inventory adjustments will have an impact on the backlog in coming quarters. The company continues to relieve its supply chain constraints, which is helping to address its unfulfilled toggle MRAM demand.

Earlier this year, Everspin Technologies announced its latest STT-MRAM devices, the EMxxLX xSPI serial interface memory. The company now announced that the EMxxLX devices are now commercially available.

The EMxxLX family is the only memory device offering density up to 64Mb, octal interface with 400MB/s bandwidth, and compatibility with the xSPI standard. The EMxxLX features 1000X faster write times compared to NOR flash.

Disclosure: the author of this post holds shares at Everspin

Researchers from Samsung will soon present at IEDM 2022 a new research paper that will discuss the company's latest achievements in scaling down its MRAM technology to the company's 14nm FinFET logic process.

The Samsung researchers produced a stand-alone memory with a write energy requirement of 25 pJ per bit and active power requirements of 14 mW for reading and 27 mW for writing at a 54Mbyte per second data rate. The cycling  is 10^14 cycles and when scaled to a 16Mbit device, a chip would occupy 30 square millimeters.

Everspin Technologies announced that it has signed a contract to provide MRAM technology, design, and back end of line manufacturing services to QuickLogic Corporation. At the first stage, Everspin will develop and demonstrate Strategic Radiation Hardened (SRH), high reliability Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology to support identified and future Department of Defense (DoD) strategic and space system requirements.

Everspin says that the initial contract is potentially valued at $2.8 million, with subsequent options bringing the total to approximately $8.7 million. The project is sponsored by DoD’s Trusted and Assured Microelectronics (T&AM) Program.

pMTJ STT-MRAM developer Avalanche Technology announced that its latest 3rd-Gen MRAM devices are now in production at its foundry partner, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). The company says that its new MRAM chips offer significant density, endurance, reliability and power benefits over existing non-volatile solutions.

Avalanche's new Parallel x 32 series is offered as a standard product in various density options and has asynchronous SRAM-compatible read/write timings. Avalanche also says that it will soon start developing 16Gb MRAM chips.

Everspin Technologies announced its financial results for Q2 2022, with revenues of $14.71 million (up 24% from Q2 2021) and a net profit of $1.7 million . The company's had a positive cash flow of $4.3 million (up from a negative cash flow of $600,000 last year). At the end of the quarter Everspin had $23.1 million in cash and equivalents.

Everspin expects that industry supply constraints will limit supply, and the company reduces its forecast for Q3 2022 - with revenues seen to be in the range of $14.4 million to $15.4 million. Everspin says that price increases from its suppliers and expenses related to 28nm STT-MRAM development will reduce its earnings next quarter and the company will be breakeven or with a small profit.

pMTJ STT-MRAM developer Avalanche Technology announced that it is providing its MRAM Persistent SRAM chips to industrial touch screen applications developed by FALINUX.

FALINUX is using Avalanche's 8Mb P-SRAM device in its next generation Human Machine Interface (HMI) products used in industrial automation systems. The company says it chose Avalanche's MRAM technology due to its ease of use, instant write capability, practically unlimited endurance and data retention in harsh environmental conditions.

A few months ago, Everspin Technologies launched a new family of SPI/QSPI/xSPI interface MRAM products that offer the world's highest performance persistent memory with full read and write bandwidth of 400 Megabytes per second through the new JEDEC expanded Serial Peripheral Interface (xSPI) standard interface. The EMxxLX family was launched with densities ranging from 8 Mbit to 64 Mbit.

Today Everspin announced a new xSPI MRAM device, the EM128LX, that expands the product line to 128Mbit.  Everspin says that the combination of increased density with up to 233 megabytes/second full read and write bandwidth means that system designers now have the option of merging code and data memory on the same device, reducing cost, power, and area.