Motorola demoes MRAM

The EET is reporting that Motorola has demonstrated a viable 256kb MRAM, and that MRAMs could reach the market by 2004. Here's a snippet:

As well as retaining its state when power is removed, the one- transistor, one
magnetic tunneling junction (1T-1MTJ) architecture has exhibited phenomenal
endurance moving beyond 10 billion read-write operations, with no degradation in
resistance. That means MRAM is likely to exceed the numbers achieved by flash
and ferroelectric memory. Reading does involve a current passing through the MTJ
stack but accelerated testing has shown in excess of 10 years
mean-time-to-failure, Tehrani said.

Together with its very fast read and write times - on the order of a few tens of
nanoseconds - MRAM has small-sized memory cells. "We think this is going to
[be] better than ferro [ferroelectric memory] in terms of cell size. With flash,
although MRAM tends to be a little larger in cell size, we don't need the charge
pump [used to develop a programming voltage on flash] so we can be smaller
overall," said Tehrani.

However, Motorola isn't the only company rushing to bring MRAM to market. IBM and
Infineon are also in the game.