March 2007

Professor wins 450K$ grant to develop stable, low cost MRAM chips

Siu-Tat Chui, University of Delaware professor of physics and astronomy, has won a $450,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help develop stable, magnetic-random-access-memory (MRAM) chips that would replace the random access memory (RAM) commonly used in computers.

Chui, who focuses on theoretical research in condensed matter physics, will be working in collaboration with Sam Bader, chief scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory, to find more reliable ways to write data to MRAM and then develop an experimental demonstration of the technique.

NVE Notified of Grant of VMRAM Patent

NVE Corporation announced today that it has been notified by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) of the expected grant of a patent relating to Vertical Transport Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (VMRAM).

NVE has been notified that the patent, titled "Radial field generating selection conductor device," will be issued today. The patent is number 7,193,286 and is the grant of a patent under the application published by the USPTO as number 2006-0022238. The new patent relates to addressing Vertical Transport MRAM arrays.

The co-inventors were an NVE researcher and Professor Jian-Gang Zhu of Carnegie Mellon University, and the patent is assigned to NVE.

Read the full story Posted: Mar 20,2007

Honeywell develops non-volatile MRAM for strategic space applications

Honeywell has developed a one-million bit non volatile static memory component for strategic space electronics applications (see related story). Built with Honeywell's radiation-hardened, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, and combined with magnetic thin films, the new memory component provides high reliability for low-voltage systems operating in radiation environments.

The magnetic RAM runs from a 3.3-volt power supply and has high reliability, enabling it to operate through the natural radiation found in space. It offers nearly unlimited read/write cycles (>1e15) and uses Honeywell's 150-nanometer SOI CMOS technology as well as a unique set of wafer processes developed at the company's "Trusted Foundry" in Plymouth, Minn.

Read the full story Posted: Mar 17,2007

Chinese research produces nano-ring MRAM device

A research team led by Professor Han Xiufeng from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Physics has developed a novel type of magnetic RAM, according to the Academy.The Chinese MRAM consists of arrays of magnetic memory cells in which the information is stored as the magnetization direction of tiny ferromagnetic elements.

In a conventional MRAM design scheme, writing these elements uses two crossed pulse currents to produce a synthesized magnetic field to reverse selected magnetic elements, and the read process relies on the tunneling magneto-resistance (TMR) ratio.

Read the full story Posted: Mar 11,2007

New report covers the markets for FRAM, MRAM, ovonic memory and other memory types

Research and Markets has announced the addition of The Market For Nano-Enabled Memory and Storage - 2006 & Beyond to their offering. This report covers the markets for FRAM, MRAM, ovonic memory, nanotube memory, molecular memory, polymer memory, holographic memory, MEMS-based memory systems and other memory technologies likely to be commercialized in the next decade.

The report identifies and quantifies the opportunities presented by these technologies and the timeframes in which they will emerge. The current state of the market for each of these technologies is identified are they in R&D, sampling, pilot production, full-scale production? as are the markets for these products are to be found. The report discusses which kinds of end product would use each of these technologies and in what context do they replace DRAM, SRAM, Flash, disk storage or some combination of these? Will they create entirely new products?

Read the full story Posted: Mar 11,2007

Intel to sample PRAM this year

Intel's new phase-change memory technology, called PRAM by Intel and PCM by others who are working on the same type of memory, is set to sample in the first half of this year. Intel says they plan to ship the first PRAM modules as a straight-ahead NOR flash replacement so that they can work the kinks out of the design before trying to move it up the memory hierarchy. The company claims a much higher number of read-write cycles (100 million) than flash, as well as a potential 10 years' worth of data retention.