November 2011

Singulus Technologies says that in the past couple of months they have noticed "increased activities in the area of MRAM memory by large semiconductor companies". The company expects MRAM development to progress and they consider themselves to be in an exceptional starting position for the upcoming growth market of MRAM memory. Their TIMARIS vacuum coating machines are already used by customers to develop MRAM wafers.

Crocus announced that Morpho plans to develop smartcards based on Crocus' Magnetic-Logic-Unit (MLU) technology. The two companies signed an agreement under which Crocus will develop an MLU-based secure microcontroller which Morpho will integrate into its smart card products. The secure microcontroller product will be compliant with the latest quality and security standards.

According to Crocus, MLU technology (which is an adaption of thermally-assisted magnetic switching, or TAS, for use in memory access in addition to storage) offers the advantage of much higher read-write cycle endurance, compared with leading-edge flash memory, while also offering inherent non-volatility and low power operation. The use of MLU should also provide match-in-place capability, which can be used for secure authentication.

Toshiba has a new hybrid cache design that uses STT-MRAM and SRAM combination. This is aimed towards next-generation low-power computer processors. These new computers will usually be off, and the time and power it takes to "wake up" is considerable. The new design can reduce the energy consumption by around half - and does not effect processing capacity.

Toshiba's design uses a 512Kb STT-MRAM cache combined with a 32Kb register file and a 64Kb SRAM primary cache. Using the non-volatile MRAM, the power gating can be conducted more frequently. In current designs, it takes around 20 micro seconds to recover from power gating and about 150 micro seconds from deep-sleep mode. In the new design, it takes only 1 micro second to recover from power gating.

Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) developed new flexible non-volatile resistive random access memory (RRAM) on plastic. The team used memristors integrated with high-performance single-crystal silicon transistors.

This is the first time such a flexible memory is achieved. Bending memory cells causes cell-to-cell interference. To solve this problem, you have to integrate transistors. But most transistors built on plastic substrates (organic/oxide transistors) are not capable of achieving the sufficient performance level with which to drive conventional memory. The new single-crystal silicon transistors used by KAIST solve this issue.