Emerging memories: Ship first, perfect later

Everspin needs GlobalFoundries' 300mm wafer capability to help bring its STT-MRAM embedded memory to market.

Perennially emerging memories may be getting stuck in that mode in part because vendors are awaiting an elusive goal: perfection. But Everspin CEO Phillip LoPresti believes instead that it is important to get technology into production to gain market adoption.

The MRAM maker's ongoing partnership with GlobalFoundries is part of that strategy, and Everspin just announced that its most advanced STT-MRAM technology will be available as an embedded memory through that relationship. GlobalFoundries recently announced its 22FDX eMRAM, providing customers with access to memory that offers the benefit of a working memory such as SRAM, combined with code storage in the form of flash.

Everspin is arguably one of the few, if only, MRAM makers shipping the product, although last year Avalanche Technology announced it was sampling what it claimed were the industry's first Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM or STT-MRAM chips. Its STT-MRAM memory on proprietary perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction or pMTJ cells is manufactured on a high volume, low cost, standard CMOS 300mm process. Spin Transfer Technologies recently outlined its 20nm MRAM milestones.

In a phone interview with EE Times, Everspin's LoPresti said that while the company has been producing high-volume eMRAM in 130nm with first-generation MRAM technology for more than five years in its Chandler, Arizona fab, it really needed the capability of GlobalFoundries' 300mm wafer line to meet volume demand. Together, he said, there are lots of opportunities to bring embedded MRAM to market.

To read the full article, go to EE Times.