âMRAM has the potential to be widely used, it has to go down the cost curve,â replies Mayer. âToday it is niche. There is nothing intrinsically in the technology that says it canât go down the cost curve. I donât know of any showstopper why it canât be widely used.â
But Cypress Semiconductor pulled out of MRAM last year, with CEO, T. J. Rogers, saying that the technology could not be made cost competitive with SRAM. âOurs works,â responds Mayer.
The firm is positioning and pricing MRAM to be a replacement for battery-backed SRAM. However, with a cell size four times smaller than SRAM, the Freescale MRAM has the potential to get considerably denser than the current 4Mbit which is made on a 0.18 micron process. For instance a 90nm process delivers a 64Mbit MRAM.
However, as now constituted, Freescaleâs MRAM cell will always be bigger than a NAND flash cell on the same geometry and so MRAM will not compete with NAND flash.