Thursday, 15 November 2012 11:25
Everspin comes up with non-volatile magnetic RAM
Written by Nick Farrell
500 times faster than NAND
Everspin has announced that it’s shipping the first 64Mb ST-MRAM in a DDR3-compatible module.
According to its press release the MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) transfer data at DDR3-1600 clock rates, but access latencies are much lower than flash RAM. This means that they can manage 500 times the performance of conventional NAND. It works by using a single magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) and one transistor. When power comes on spin-polarized electrons tunnel through the dielectric barrier. The angular momentum of the electrons is transferred to the magnetic layer, “flipping” the polarisation. The cell is read by measuring its resistance.
The advantage is that the spin-torque technology uses much less power for writes than conventional MRAM and can be scaled. Once the data has been written, cells don’t need to be refreshed. MRAM retains its data if the power is turned off, and it doesn’t draw power to retain data during active system operation.
You can check out the geeky details here.
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