November 2009

The Korean Government has decided to fund STT-RAM research for Hynix and Samsung in a $40 million project. The government will pay around half of the sum for the project, which is intended to run till 2014. The project calls for the government to work with Samsung and Hynix together for research and development on STT-MRAM chips. Korea aims to control around 45% of the 30-nano type memory chip market by 2015.

The companies have already opened a new laboratory at Hangyang University's fusion technology center. It is already equipped with a fully operational 300mm magnetic thin film deposition system and other chip-making facilities.

Everspin is introducing a new family of MRAM products, with a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus. The new family is called MR24H and includes 256Kb, 512Kb and 1Mb products. These Everspin MRAM devices require no write delay, run at clock speeds as fast as 40 MHz and have unlimited endurance with more than 20 years data retention. 

The MR25H256 (256Kb), MR25H512 (512Kb) and MR25H10 (1Mb) serial MRAM products operate from  2.7 to 3.6 volts while offering low standby and operating currents as well as a 3 uA (typical) sleep mode to further improve the system power consumption. They are byte-organized internally, containing 32KB, 64KB and 128KB of data respectively. Industry-standard serial SPI command codes and timing enable easy connection to existing MCU and system designs. The devices are housed in low profile 8-pin RoHS-compliant DFN packages that are pin-out and footprint compatible with serial EEPROM, Flash and FeRAM products in comparable DFN or SOIC packages.

Spingate is a new US-based fabless company focusing on development, licensing and manufacturing of solid state memory, specifically, perpendicular MRAM.

We have talked to Dr. Alex Shukh, Spingate's co-founder, CTO and CEO. Alex explains that they have decided to focus on perpendicular MRAM because according to their estimates it does not suffer from several fundamental issues of its longitudinal (in-plane) analogue.

However, to be successful with p-MRAM development, Spingate needs to solve several serious problems, such as, a reduction of energy consumption during writing, development of new magnetic materials with perpendicular anisotropy for storage and reference layers exhibiting high GMR, etc.

Spingate's IP portfolio already includes one granted and several pending patents on p-MRAM, which covers multi-bit cell, 3D-memory designs, etc. The proposed solutions should close existing cell density gap between MRAM and Flash since 2D-Flash won't be able to compete with 3D-MRAM. Spingate are currently working on cell design development and optimization, and is looking for investors.