July 2011

Toshiba and Hynix announced an agreement to jointly develop MRAM products. Once the development is complete, the companies intend to establish an MRAM production plant together. We believe the companies intend to develop STT-MRAM technology.

Toshiba has been developing STT-MRAM for quite some time, and just a few days ago reported a breakthrough MTJ device that could pave the way towards Gigabit MRAM devices. They expect such chips within 3-4 years, so that's probably the same time frame on the new JV with Hynix.

Toshiba says that their newly developed perpendicular magnetization-type magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) device has excellent properties - and it can be a basic element towards a gigabit STT-MRAM device. The company says that these 'research results' are encouraging and they will now shift to the development of products. Commercialization of gigabit STT-MRAM is expected within 3 to 4 years.

MTJ cross section (Toshiba)

The device's writing current density is 5 x 10⁵Acm^-2, which is 1/6 that of the company's existing products. And its magnetic resistance (MR), which determines data reading margin, is 200%, which was drastically improved from the 15% of the existing products. Toshiba managed to have both a low writing current density and a high MR ratio by using cobalt and iron based materials for the recording layer.

Spingate invented a nonvolatile field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology employing the company's proprietary spin logic. The spin logic represents an elegant synthesis of conventional CMOS logic with embedded magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) residing above the silicon. The embedded MTJs use a spin induced writing mechanism to reverse a magnetization in a storage magnetic layer. The proper use of these MTJs enable the entire circuit to be non-volatile.

The company has several pending patents that cover basic components of the new technology: logic gates, latches, flip-flops, adders, multiplexers, etc. According to Spingate, the nonvolatile FPGA technology has an excellent scalability and almost zero power consumption in a standby mode of operation. It can provide a significant reduction of interconnects and chip size. The new technology can effectively compete with existing FPGA technologies in price and performance.

Kontron announces a new AdvancedMC (AMC) processor module, the AM4120. It has a 1.2Ghz QorQI P2020 Freescale processor, 2GB or 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM, four SERDES lines, three Ethernet channels (gigabit). It also includes 128KB or 512KB of MRAM memory.