April 2014

Last month we reported that Avalanche Technology has been awarded four key "milestone" patents for its STT-MRAM technology and solid-state storage array system design. Today the company announced that it has been awarded four new STT-MRAM patents in areas of Perpendicular STT-MRAM and MRAM Integration and Manufacturing. Avalanche has over 200 filed patents that covers the full spectrum from memory cell/circuit design and manufacturing to solid-state storage system development and deployment.

The company has been awarded three key patents in the area of Perpendicular STT-MRAM:

Coughlin Associates released a new report on non-volatile memory and storage technologies. The authors see MRAM and STT-MRAM replacing SRAM and DRAM within the next few years - and probably before RRAM replaces flash memory. MRAM advances quickly and this will result in lower prices which will make the technology very competitive.

Coughlin projects that MRAM and STT-MRAM annual shipping capacity will rise from an about 80 TB in 2013 to 16.5 PB in 2019. Revenues will increase from $190 million in 2013 to $2.1 billion in 2019. This will obviously require more production capacity and the MRAM manufacturing equipment market (not including the CMOS creation) will rise from $52.9 million in 2013 to $246.3 million in 2019.

In November 2013, Crocus Technology filed an Inter Partes Review petition to the US PTO, claiming that Spin Transfer Technologies's US patent #6,980,469 describes a technology already used in prior art, in particular in the patent portfolio of Crocus.

Crocus Technology now says that the USPTO issued a preliminary decision in favor of Crocus' petition - saying that there is a “reasonable likelihood” that Crocus will prevail with respect to its challenge. The patent in question describes a high-speed low power magnetic devices based on current induced spin-moment transfer.

In January 2013, NVE filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Everspin Technologies. A few months later, Everspin filed a patent lawsuit of their own against NVE.

Yesterday NVE announced that the two companies agreed to drop both lawsuits and will not assert the patents in those suits against each other in the future. NVE says that this agreement (which seems to be a appointment's to their shareholders) is limited to the patents in the 2012 lawsuits.

Back in June 2013 Samsung Electronics launched a global research outreach program aimed towards STT-MRAM innovation. The Samsung Global MRAM Innovation (SGMI) wanted wanted to reach out to colleges, universities and research labs from all over the world to explore breakthrough and innovative STT-MRAM research.

Samsung ran a short ad campaign on MRAM-Info and Spintronics-Info to help discover partners. Samsung informed us that they received lots of best and most novel proposals on a range of compelling research subjects. They are now collaborating with 15 SGMI partners. Hopefully we'll someday hear of the advances made through these collaborations.