Philips has a new application for a patent: A passive MRAM that will "self destruct" when someone tries to open it.
When you try and physically open the device, magnets inside will destroy the data stored in the MRAM chip.
Freescale executives discuss the future of MRAM in mixed-signal platform. MRAM may pose some benefits to those platforms, and we may yet see MRAM in a handset.
Another option is combining MRAM with sensors and logic in a system-in-package implementation. Airbags for example could be a target.
Phase change memory, one of the ideas that's been bounced around the technology industry for over thirty years, got a big endorsement this week from IBM and Samsung.
One of the leading candidates to replace flash, magnetic RAM, looks good and Freescale Semiconductor has already come out with an MRAM device. Shrinking MRAM, however, is proving to be tough. The cell sizes are big too.
Freescale has agreed to be sold to for $17.6 billion, to a private equity consortium led by Blackstone Group, in what could be the biggest leveraged buyout of a technology company.
âMRAM has the potential to be widely used, it has to go down the cost curve,â replies Mayer. âToday it is niche. There is nothing intrinsically in the technology that says it canât go down the cost curve. I donât know of any showstopper why it canât be widely used.â
But Cypress Semiconductor pulled out of MRAM last year, with CEO, T. J. Rogers, saying that the technology could not be made cost competitive with SRAM. âOurs works,â responds Mayer.
The firm is positioning and pricing MRAM to be a replacement for battery-backed SRAM. However, with a cell size four times smaller than SRAM, the Freescale MRAM has the potential to get considerably denser than the current 4Mbit which is made on a 0.18 micron process. For instance a 90nm process delivers a 64Mbit MRAM.
However, as now constituted, Freescaleâs MRAM cell will always be bigger than a NAND flash cell on the same geometry and so MRAM will not compete with NAND flash.
ECD Ovonics' Ovonyx, Inc. joint venture secured new licenses with major chip manufacturers globally to commercialize Ovonic Unified Memory (OUM) technology and one of its licensees, BAE, announced a product based on OUM technology.Â
Freescale is in talks to be become private. The company is to be bought for $16 Billion, by several private investment firms.
This might have implications on Freescale's MRAM research and product line.
In a research first that could lead to a new generation of hard drives capable of storing thousands of movies per square inch, physicists at Rice University have decoded the three-dimensional structure of a tornado-like magnetic vortex no larger than a red blood cell.
"Understanding the nuances and functions of magnetic vortices is likely going to be a key in creating next-generation magnetic storage devices," said lead researcher Carl Rau, professor of physics and astronomy. "It's widely believed this technology will support storage densities in the range of terabits per square inch, and our group is equally excited about the potential for magnetic processors and for high-speed magnetic RAM."
KDF today announced that Ovonyx, Inc., a Rochester Hills, Mich.-based company specializing in the commercialization of proprietary phase-change semiconductor memory technology, has purchased the new KDF Ci (cluster intelligence) cluster tool for use in support of commercialization programs for its technology. The product, which is expected to ship in the third quarter 2007, marks a first-time cluster tool win for KDF and the companyâs entry into a new market.
Non-volatile phase-change memory boasts rapid write and erase speeds, elevated cycling endurance, and superior scaling performance as the industry moves toward newer generations of nonvolatile solid state memory. Ovonyx will continue its programs for Ovonyx Unified Memory (OUM) performance enhancement and cost reduction on KDFâs innovative cluster tool. The customized cluster tool with a hydrogen cleaning station will allow Ovonyx and its customers to develop manufacturing processes in a preproduction environment using a cluster tool that emulates their fab environments. Â
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