December 2006

IBM has received a new patent, titled - "New Magnetic tunnel junctions for MRAM devices".

Methods of manufacturing MTJ memory cells and structures thereof. A diffusion barrier is disposed between an anti-ferromagnetic layer and a pinned layer of an MTJ memory cell to improve thermal stability of the MTJ memory cell. The diffusion barrier may comprise an amorphous material or a NiFe alloy. An amorphous material may be disposed adjacent a bottom surface of a tunnel junction, within a free layer, or both. An MTJ memory cell with improved thermal stability and decreased Neel coupling is achieved.

NVE Corporation said that it has been notified by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) of the expected grant today of a patent relating to Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM). The patent, titled "Magnetoresistive Memory SOI Cell," is number 7,148,531 and is the grant of a patent under the application published by the USPTO as number 2005-0242382.
 
NVE's invention relates to MRAM incorporating silicon-on-insulator (SOI) materials. The invention could allow smaller MRAM cells and lower power consumption by reducing the electrical current required to write data to the memory cells.

Read  more here 

IBM has announced a working prototype of a new type of memory called phase-change memory (PCM) that could replace both Flash and conventional RAM when it comes to market sometime in three- to five-year timespan. The company boasts that their PCM technology is 500 times faster than conventional NAND Flash, with a smaller cell size that uses half of the power.

IBM's TJ Watson Research Center developed the technology in conjunction with Macronix and Quimonda (the DRAM spin-off of Infineon), and the company has been cultivating it as one of a number of next-generation storage technologies like MRAM.

Read more here 

Physicists at the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Leeds have discovered a way to precisely control the pattern of magnetic fields in thin magnetic films, which can be used to store information.

The discovery has important consequences for the IT industry, as current technology memory storage has limited scope for developing further. The density with which information can be stored magnetically in permanent memory - hard drives - is reaching a natural limit related to the size of the magnetic particles used. The much faster silicon-chip based random access memory - RAM - in computers loses the information stored when the power is switched off.

The key advance of the recent research has been in developing ways to use high energy beams of gallium ions to artificially control the direction of the magnetic field in regions of cobalt films just a few atoms thick.

 Another approach to overcoming the problem of storing data permanently with rapid retrieval times is that of magnetic random access memory chips (MRAMs); prototypes of these have already been developed by several companies. However, MRAM uses the stray magnetic fields generated by wires that carry a high electrical current to switch the data state from “up” to “down”, which greatly limits the density of information storage.

In contrast, if the approach at Bath is developed commercially, this would allow the manufacture of magnetic memory chips with much higher packing densities, which can operate many times faster.

Read more here