Everspin Technologies announced that it started to ship pre-production customer samples of its 28 nm 1Gb STT-MRAM chips in December 2018. Everspin already announced that it started to sample these new 1Gb STT-MRAM chips in November 2018.

In November 2017 Everspin announced it will delay its 1Gb STT-MRAM chips as its focus has shifted to its 256 Mb STT-MRAM chips. It is great, tough, to see Everspin progressing with its larger MRAM chip and we hope that mass production will begin, as planned, in the middle of 2019.

Researchers from Japan's Tohoku University developed a 128 Mb STT-MRAM device that features a write speed of 14 nm, the world's fastest STT-MRAM chip at a density over 100 Mb.

To achieve this high speed, the researchers developed MTJs that are integrated with CMOS, which also significantly reduces the power-consumption of the memory device.

Market analyst firm Yole Developpement presents its latest next-generation memory forecasts in an interesting new article. The company says that following more than 15 years of development, PCM is finally taking off in stand-alone applications due to strong support from Intel and Micron.

STT-MRAM is expected to lead the embedded memory race as many foundries are rushing to add MRAM support and expertise to their product lines. STT-MRAM is promising for enterprise storage SCM.

Researchers at Belgium-based research institute Imec presented the first power-performance area comparison between SRAM and STT-MRAM last-level cache at the 5 nm node.

The analysis, based on design-technology co-optimization and silicon verified models, reveals that STT-MRAM meets the performance requirements for last-level caches in the high-performance computing domain. For larger memory densities, STT-MRAM was found to offer significant energy gains compared to SRAM.

pMTJ STT-MRAM developer Avalanche Technology announced its 2nd-generation serial non-volatile discrete MRAM memory family. The SPnvSRAM family offers 1 Mb to 32 Mb densities at extended-temperature industrial-grade specifications. Avalanche says that these devices, available in low pin count, small package options, are ideal for a broad range of industrial, automotive and consumer applications.

Avalanche's 2-Gen SPnvSRAM is offered in 108-MHz Quad Serial Peripheral Interface (QSPI) performance as a byte addressable memory thus eliminating the need for software device drivers.

SMART Modular Technologies has launched its new nvNITRO U.2 Storage Accelerator that features Everspin's STT-MRAM technology. The nvNITRO is ideally suited for synchronous logging applications such as those used for financial trading.

SMART's nvNITRO U.2 Storage Accelerator uses a standard NVMe interface that is 1.2.1 compliant and provides less than six microseconds of industry-leading low latency access with persistence so that all logging data is safe. The U.2 form factor brings with it the advantage of being hot-swappable.

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.

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.

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.