SRAM, DRAM, NVRAM, yah yah yah... But MRAM was a new one to me.
This Magnetic-RAM sound pretty amazing. I look forward to seeing products with it later this year.
Freescale beats IBM and Toshiba with major MRAM improvement
July 11, 2006
Major breakthrough in Random Access Memory was reported by Texan-based company Freescale Seminconductor on Monday, pushing the limits of data storage to unseen limits and bringing a solution to a problem that has lasted in the IT industry for more than a decade.
The most important improvement the new memory chip features is its capacity to store data while powered down. The new chip combines both the endurance and long life-span of the common RAM from today and the ability to keep information on its microcircuits active, without electricity passing through it. The later represents a major breakthrough in the hardware industry, since it has been sort of a Holy Grail for many IT giants like IBM, Toshiba or NEC.
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MRAM uses magnetic materials combined with conventional silicon circuitry to deliver the speed of SRAM with the non-volatility of Flash in a single, high endurance device. Freescale's successful commercialization of this technology could hasten new classes of electronic products offering dramatic advances in size, cost, power consumption and system performance.
Unlike conventional RAM chip technologies, data is not stored as electric charge or current flows, but by magnetic storage elements. The elements are formed from two ferromagnetic plates, each of which can hold a magnetic field, separated by a thin insulating layer. One of the two plates is a permanent magnet set to a particular polarity, the other's field will change to match that of an external field. A memory device is built from a grid of such "cells".
MRAM requires no refresh at any time. Not only does this mean it retains its memory with the power turned off, but also that there is no constant power draw. Additionally, the read process requires less power than the same process in a DRAM, although the write process requires about eight times the power as reading[3]. Although the exact amount of power savings depends on the nature of the work – more frequent writing will require more power – in general MRAM proponents expect much lower power consumption (up to 99% less!!!).
