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Freescale begins selling 4 Mbit MRAM
Monday 10 July 2006 ....... Freescale today started commercial shipments of its 4-Mbit magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM), with small-volume sales priced at $25 per chip, said Saied Tehrani, the director of the MRAM program based at Freescale's Chandler, Ariz. facility.
Analysts said Freescale's move into volume MRAM production, after two years of sampling, represents a breakthrough. "Freescale's entry says we are now officially in the era of new memory technology," said Semico Research analyst Bob Merritt.
The Freescale MRAM products are fast, with read and write times at 35 ns. While skeptics have questioned whether MRAM's cell size can be competitive in the cost-conscious memory market, Tehrani said the 4 Mbit product has a 1.26 square micron cell size in a 0.18 micron process. Freescale will skip the 0.13 micron generation and jump next to the 90 nm node, where the cell size is 0.29 square microns. That compares with about 1 square micron for 90 nm SRAM's, which use a six-transistor structure per bit.
While Freescale may create 16 Mbit DRAM's at some point, Tehrani said the company "has no intention to become a commodity MRAM vendor." Its target is replacing flash and other memory types in microcontrollers, including automotive-use MCU's where reliability and endurance are important.
