February 2013

Everspin announced a new MRAM chip, the 1-Megabit serial MR10Q010 that features a Quad-SPI interface. Quad SPI, which has four serial I/O paths, is an evolutionary upgrade from SPI (that has a single I/O path). Everspin expects the new part, which has a 104 MHz clock speed with 52 MBps read/write bandwidth, to be used in applications that require high frequency, high-performance writes of most critical data.

The MR10Q010 MRAM offers read/write bandwidth comparable to parallel I/O MRAM but with a significant savings in pins and allows execute in place (XIP) operation. The chip includes a complete command set for Quad SPI operations including fast reads and writes in which address and data are input on all four I/Os to reduce clock cycles. The part comes in a cost-effective, low pin count 16-pin SOIC package – a savings of 20 pins over parallel interfaces – that supports low voltage levels with separate VDDQ for I/O. It is compatible with future high-density Quad SPI packages that Everspin is planning to introduce.

Yole Développement released a new report on Emerging Non-Volatile Memories (which include four major technologies: MRAM, PCM, RRAM and FeRAM). They see the market increasing ten-fold in the next five years to $2 billion by 2018 (of which STT-MRAM and PCM will take the major share of $1.6 billion) - mostly due to improved scalability and chip density.

The largest market will be enterprise storage, where STT-MRAM and PCM cache memory will be adopted. PCM will also be used in mobile phones thanks to 1GB chips made available by Micron in 2012. STT-MRAM is expected to replace SRAM in SoC applications thanks to lower power consumption and better scalability. Another market for MRAM and STT-MRAM is smart card MCUs.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK have developed the world's first 3D microchip, based on Spintronics technology. The chip basically uses atoms to store and transfer the data - and not electronic transistors. This may lead to 3D MRAM chips that have a large memory density - thousands of times larger than what's available today.

To create this chip they used sputtering - effectively making a sandwich on a silicon chip of cobalt, platinum and ruthenium atoms. The cobalt and platinum atoms store the digital information in a similar way to how a hard disk drive stores data. The ruthenium atoms act as messengers, communicating that information between neighboring layers of cobalt and platinum. Each of the layers is only a few atoms thick.