August 2013

During Flash Memory Summit 2013, Sony delivered a lecture on ReRAM (resistive random-access memory) - a technology Sony has been developing together with Micron. Sony hopes to start producing 16Gb ReRAM chips by 2015 (20nm) for the storage-class memory (SCM) market (SCM fills the performance gap between DRAM and NAND).

Sony says they chose ReRAM as its SCM because its memory cell can be made using advanced process technologies and a cross-point cell array can be used for it, making it easy to increase memory density.

Everspin Technologies announced today that they closed a Series B financing, raising $15 million from venture capital firms including New Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Lux Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Epic Ventures. The money will be used to launch their first ST-MRAM products (hopefully by 2013).

Everspin ST-MRAM chips

Everspin also announced that they sold over 10 million MRAM chips. In the end of 2011 the company said they sold 4 million chips. They actually hoped to sell 5 million chips in 2012 which means that the current rate is actually lower than expected (if they only now reached 10 million chips) - but still this is an impressive milestone for MRAM technology (Everspin is still the only company shipping commercial MRAM chips).

Rambus is famous for its DDR-SDRAM memory technology, and the company is also working on NAND technologies. The company now reveals that they are also looking into alternative memory technologies - RRAM and MRAM.

The company is interested apparently in scaling up MRAM and getting high performance.