By Dr. Sanjeev Aggarwal, President & CEO of Everspin
Sanjeev Aggarwal, Ph.D.
The memory market, along with its adjacent industries, will continue to propel advancements in memory technology, driving higher densities, faster access speeds and lower power consumption. As the sun sets on the ability for NOR Flash memory to scale to smaller nodes (< 40nm CMOS) or larger monolithic densities (> 256Mb), there is a demand for innovation of alternative memory technologies. Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) is an obvious choice for meeting the scaling requirements that NOR Flash cannot meet. Leading foundries such as Global Foundries, TSMC and Samsung are offering embedded MRAM as an alternative to 2x and smaller CMOS nodes.
Everspin is taking the lead in providing stand-alone MRAM as an alternative to stand-alone NOR Flash, offering faster access and lower power, and enabling a simpler systems architecture that does not require data scrubbing and erase before writing. Everspin’s roadmap introduces Automotive Grade 256Mb – 2Gb density MRAM for this market in the 2025/26 time frame. Features include an Octal SPI interface, two orders of magnitude faster writes and two orders of magnitude greater write endurance with no data scrubbing for retention. These innovative memories support faster Over The Air (OTA) updates allowing 2 to 3 orders of magnitude faster configuration updates to the FPGAs in systems. This means a 1Gb UNISYST MRAM can be reprogrammed in about 2 seconds compared to several minutes with NOR Flash.
