The MRAM Developer Day 2018 took place on August 6th, as part of this year's Flash Memory Summit. This seemed to have been an interesting event, with presentations from Everspin, GlobalFoundries, IBM, Applied Materials, Spin Transfer Technologies and more.
The organizers of the event posted the entire proceedings online - you can see all presentations here.
Tom Coughlin posted an interesting overview of the 2018 MRAM Developer day, which is well worth a read. Besides the conference report, Coughlin also updates on its market estimates - the market for MRAM and STT-MRAM memory solutions will experience fast growth - growing from $36 million in 2017 to about $3.3 billion in 2028. This growth will be at the expense of SRAM, NOR flash and some DRAM.
The demand for MRAM memory will result in an increased demand for MRAM production equipment, of course. MRAM equipment revenues will reach $792 million by 2028, according to Coughlin Associates.
Last week, during the MRAM Developer Day (part of the 2018 Flash Memory Summit), Everspin's Kevin Conley gave one of the keynote addresses.
Kevin talk is interesting to read - it discuses Everspin's history, the current state of the MRAM market, some MRAM applications and the future of MRAM technologies. To read the entire address, click here.
Researchers from UC Berkeley and the Huazhong University of Science and Technology developed sub 10-nm STT MTJs that shows a thermal stability factor of more than 80.
The reserachers say that the highly efficient and dense MTJ could lead to higher efficiency and density STT-MRAM devices and spin-based computers.
Everspin announced its financial results for Q2 2018 - with revenues of $10.8 million (up from $8.9 million in Q2 2017) and a net loss of $6.6 million (up from $5.2 million in Q2 2017).
At the end of the quarter Everspin had $32.7 million in cash and equivalents. Everspin expects revenues in the next quarter to be between $10.6 million and $11 million.
A couple of days ago, Everdisplay disclosed its first major design win with a "top enterprise storage vendor" for its 40nm 256Mb STT-MRAM chips. We now know that this vendor is IBM - as it introduced its latest-generation enterprise SSD FlashSystem, which indeed includes Everspin's STT-MRAM.
Using MRAM instead of DRAM memory enabled IBM to remove the relatively large supercapacitors (used to make the DRAM non-volatile) and so the company was able to reduced the size of its drives and switch to a standard 2.5-inch U.2 drive form factor. The new FlashSystem SSDs support up to 19.2TB of 64L 3D TLC NAND. IBM's system uses a 20-channel NAND interface and a four-lane PCIe 4.0 host interface that can operate in dual-port 2+2 mode.
Everspin announced that it will demonstrate its latest MRAM technologies at the Flash Memory Summit 2018 which starts today.
In its PR, Everdisplay discloses its first major design win with a "top enterprise storage vendor" for its 40nm 256Mb STT-MRAM chips. Everspin says that MRAM enabled the vendor to achieves new levels of performance, storage capacity and reliability.
pMTJ STT-MRAM developer 
Avalanche Technology announced that it has entered into a joint development and production agreement with Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), a global semiconductor foundry.
UMC will provide embedded non-volatile STT-MRAM blocks based on UMC's 28nm CMOS manufacturing process, which will enable customers to integrate low latency, very high performance and low power embedded MRAM memory blocks into MCUs and SoCs, targeting the Internet of Things, wearable, consumer, industrial and automotive electronics markets.
SOT-MRAM (spin-orbit torque MRAM) has the potential to challenge STT-MRAM, as it is a faster, denser and much more efficient memory technology. Up until now, though, no suitable material that features both high electrical conductivity and a high spin hall effect was developed.
Now researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new thin film material made from bismuth-antimony (BiSb) that is a topological insulator that simultaneously achieves a colossal spin Hall effect and high electrical conductivity - which means it could be used to create SOT-devices.