Zeev, you have been repeatedly been saying to folks here for a year that spintonics/Mram and nvec are hype. Maybe "hype and vaporware" as you use it isn't the right word...I am thinking maybe you are just disgusted that "spintronics" is being included in "nanotech." Can you better explain yourself when you have a moment or two? Thanks in advance.
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Freescale Sampling MRAM
By Ann Steffora Mutschler -- Electronic News, 9/24/2004
Freescale Semiconductor is now sampling its magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM), which could possibly replace today’s semiconductor memory technologies, according to the company.
MRAM combines the attributes of the three major memories -- density of eDRAM, the speed of eSRAM and the non-volatility of flash -- onto a single chip. MRAM uses magnetic moments rather than an electric charge to determine the on-off state of the memory bit cell and allows a single memory solution to replace multiple memory options within one chip, which helps to enable faster, lower power, more cost-effective solutions for next-generation wireless and other memory-intensive products.
Alpha customers are evaluating MRAM for mobile communications, office products, security and control systems, networking and storage products and Freescale maintains its expectation of ramping production in 2005, a Freescale spokeswoman confirmed.
When first announced, the company was still part of Motorola Inc. The 4Mbit MRAM chips are based on a 0.18-micron five-level metal CMOS process technology.
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IBM, Stanford Team on Spintronics
Online staff -- Electronic News, 4/26/2004
IBM has teamed with Stanford University for research and creation of new high-performance, low-power electronics dubbed "spintronics."
To formalize the effort, scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Stanford today announced the formation of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center, or SpinAps.
"SpinAps researchers will work to create breakthroughs that could revolutionize the electronics industry, just as the transistor did 50 years ago," said Robert Morris, IBM VP and director of the Almaden Research Center, in a statement.
As IBM explains it, electron spin is a quantum property that has two possible states, either "up" or "down." Aligning spins in a material creates magnetism, and magnetic fields affect the passage of "up" and "down" electrons differently, Big Blue said.
IBM's Almaden lab came out with the first mass-produced spintronic device in 1997, the giant magnetoresistive head. Another multilayered spintronic structure is at the heart of the high-speed, nonvolatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM), currently being developed by a handful of companies, according to IBM.
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Nanostorage Market to Reach $65.7B by 2011
Online staff -- Electronic News, 8/18/2004
By 2011 the market for nano-engineered information storage devices will be worth $65.7 billion, according to a new report from NanoMarkets LC.
The nanotechnology industry analysis firm's forecasts concerns MRAM, FRAM, holographic memory, ovonic unified memory, molecular memory, nanotube RAM, MEMS-based memory and polymer memory, all of which are expected to generate initial revenues in the next couple of years.
Specifically, by 2011 nanostorage technology will have penetrated close to 40 percent of the disk drive and memory chip businesses, which by then are expected to total $166 billion in revenue, the firm said.
NanoMarkets explains memory requirements for tomorrow's pervasive computing -- an environment filled with always-on highly mobile computing, communications, storage and sensing devices -- go beyond the capabilities of conventional DRAM, SRAM and flash. Nanostorage technologies can meet these requirements and is potentially highly disruptive for the disk drive industry. The firm claims that is because it alters the boundaries between the disk drives and memory chips -- high-capacity, non-volatile nanostorage chips are a potential low-cost replacement for minidisk drives in portable entertainment devices and computers. In addition, holographic memory and MEMS-based memory offer significant capacity improvements over today's disk drives.
While DRAM, SRAM and flash aren't going anywhere and will continue to exist for decades, powerful backers such as AMD, Cypress and Freescale are pushing nanostorage. Major chip suppliers will continue to dominate, but NanoMarkets also sees opportunities for newer companies, such as ZettaCore and Nantero.
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MRAM Steps to 16Mbit
By Richard Wilson -- Electronics Weekly, 6/23/2004
Infineon Technologies and IBM have jointly developed a demonstration magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM) device with a capacity of 16Mbit.
The companies claim it is the highest capacity device yet demonstrated using the low power but fast read-write speed non-volatile memory technology.
“This is a major breakthrough in the development of this emerging memory technology,” said Wilhelm Beinvogl, CTO for memories at Infineon Technologies.
The chip is divided into two 8Mbit units, each of which is split into 64 128kbit blocks. Each 128kbit block contains a single array and associated circuits.
The chip was designed to operate at access and cycle times of 30ns-40ns. The other feature of the technology is that MRAM requires significantly less power in comparison to DRAM technology. So typical applications could be mobile phones and notebook PCs.
The Infineon/IBM demonstration device uses a 1-transistor 1-magnetic tunnel junction (1T1MTJ) cell and features an SRAM-like interface, which the companies said will make it particularly useful in mobile handset applications where this interface is commonly used.
Motorola, another company developing MRAM devices, described a 4Mbit chip at ISSCC in San Francisco this February.
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