August 2012

Tohoku University plans to open a new program for international academic-industrial collaboration on integrated electronics R&D in spring 2013. Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL) announced it will participate in the STT-MRAM research program, and will also develop manufacturing equipment technology for the program.

TEL has been collaborating with the university on Spintronics memory technology since December 2011, and apparently are also developing STT-MRAM STT-MRAM production equipment technology and integration technology together.

Researchers from A*STAR have posted an interesting study about STT-RAM production process. In particular, they say that it's already known that the annealing temperature controls the change in resistance between parallel and anti-parallel magnetizations. The higher the annealing temperature, the better larger the resistance change - but if the temperature is too high it drops.

The researchers now looked at an entire cell, and found out that the annealing temperature that yielded the maximum resistance variation exceeded the temperature necessary for maximum thermal stability.

Avalanche Technology announced that it has raised $30 million from existing investors (Vulcan Capital, Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Thomvest Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures) and also from a new investor, VTB capital. Avalanche hopes that this investment will enable them to bring the first products into the market.

Avalanche will produce STT-MRAM chips based on their proprietary SPMEM (Spin Programmable Memory) technology. SPMEM uses a revolutionary spin current and voltage switching technology that enables "lower write current, smaller cell size and excellent scalability". The first products will use a 65 nm process, but the company says that their technology is scalable to 10 nm or even less.