Samsung Says It’s Shipping 28-Nm Embedded MRAM

Everspin has been one of the major players in MRAM for a while. I wonder if they are using the Samsung process for their products. If I recall correctly I think Everspin was a spinoff of Freescale (formerly Motorola, now NXP). It was probably 7 or 8 years ago when I saw a presentation touting the commercially viable STT technology, and it always seemed to be just another year away.

It seems aerospace and SSD manufacturers(write cache)are pretty popular areas. It provides really fast write speeds combined with power loss tolerance and recovery of write logs and cache that DRAM and Flash alone can't provide. It's also natively Rad Hard and nearly "write unlimited" which makes it good for a lot certain niche applications where the budget can tolerate it because it ain't cheap (2MB is nearly $30 in quantity). [1]

[1]https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=everspin

If you're curious like I was, it appears that MRAM is susceptible to higher than usual magnetic fields, but shielded to prevent interference up to a certain tolerance.

"Everspin MRAM products are designed to be highly immune to magnetic fields normally found in commercial, industrial or AEC-Q100 Grade 1 applications. However, if there is concern that an MRAM device is expected to be in close proximity to a magnetic field, it may be prudent for the designer to verify that a magnetic field does not exceed the magnetic immunity specifications of the MRAM." [1]

Also of interest [2].

Careful, they are PDFs, not sure if those servers can handle too much traffic!

[1] https://www.everspin.com/file/206/download

[2] https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/application-note/AN3525.pdf

This is pretty cool. TI has been using Ferrous mRam in their micro-controllers to achieve absurdly low levels of power consumption and it's worked great. Makes me excited to see others picking up the technology to put it into use in other mediums.