February 2015

Everspin announced that Elektron Music Machines flagship synthesizer uses the company's 16-Megabit MRAM memory. The stage Analog Keys synth features 37 semi-weighted keys, four analog voices, over 4000 sound slots, a powerful sequencer, and a digital control system.

Everspin says that the fast MRAM memory with its extreme data reliability is ideal for professional audio applications - as it enables fast applications and unlimited endurance. Everspin’s 16-Megabit MR4A16BMA35 MRAM is in full production today in a standard 48-ball BGA package and is designed to be used in a system like any standard 16-bit parallel memory with no software overhead.

Everspin announced a new MRAM-based Arduino shield evaluation board, designed for compatibility with any Arduino-derived host platform featuring a UNO expansion interface. The MR10Q010-EVAL uses Everspin's MR10Q010 1Mb Quad-SPI MRAM, with the STMicroelectronics ARM-based NUCLEO-F411RE.

This is the first MRAM-based Arduino shield, and it offers developers fast, non-volatile memory with virtually unlimited endurance and high data retention. Developers can order samples from Everspin's site.

Northwest Logic announced that its controller core has been validated with Everspin's EMD3D064M STT-MRAM chips. This interoperability is hardware proven on a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA platform and is now available for designs needing low-latency, high memory throughput using MRAM technology.

Everspin says that their ST-MRAM chips coupled with Northwest Logic's controller Core provides storage and memory system designers a new level of capability to have critical cache and in-flight data inherently protected.

Yole Developpement released a new emerging-memory market report in which they try to asses the future of the memory market. Yose says that Phase-change memory (PCM) is pretty much dead, and the two main emerging memory technologies are MRAM and Resistive random Access Memory (ReRAM or RRAM).

While RRAM is very promising in the near future, with support from Micron (they plan to release RRAM chips in 2015) and Panasonic while other players are expected to react quickly. RRAM and STT-MRAM will compete in 2015-2016 in some standalone markets (such as embedded MCU, wearables and smart cards and the storage class memory for enterprise storage which will be the biggest market), and it's not clear yet which technology will be the most popular.