Last July, Samsung and IBM announced that they had developed a new process to manufacture a non-volatile RAM, named MRAM which is up to 100,000 times faster than NAND flash. Well, if the reports are to be believed, the South Korean giant will be unveiling the MRAM memory next month at its Foundry Forum event.
MRAM stands for magnetoresistive RAM and it’s produced using Spin-transfer torque technology. This will in-turn lead to low-capacity memory chips for mobile devices that currently use NAND flash to store data.
This STT-MRAM will consume very less power when it’s on and storing information. When the RAM is not active, it won’t use any power because the memory is non-volatile. So, this MRAM is widely expected to be used by manufacturers for ultra-low power applications.
As per Samsung, production cost of embedded DRAM is cheaper than that of flash memory. Despite MRAM’s smaller size, its speed is also faster than normal flash memories. Unfortunately, Samsung is unable to produce more than a few megabytes of the memory right now. In the present state, MRAM is only good enough to be used as cache memory to application processors.
Samsung’s Foundry Forum Event is scheduled to be held on May 24 and that’s hopefully when we’ll get more details regarding Samsung’s upcoming MRAM. It has been reported that Samsung’s LSI business department has worked up a prototype of a SoC that has MRAM built inside, which is also likely to be unveiled at the same event.
Abubakar Mohammed
