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Freescale Announces MRAM — Parallax Forums

Freescale Announces MRAM

Bruce BatesBruce Bates Posts: 3,045
edited 2006-07-23 00:10 in General Discussion
Folks -

It looks like Freescale is going to try to give Ramtron a run for its money in the field of magneto-resistive memory. It will be interesting to see if there are any patent infringements involved, with some of Freescale's rather bold claims of being "first":
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6092242.html?tag=nl.e589

Regards,

Bruce Bates


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Comments

  • Michael ChadwickMichael Chadwick Posts: 80
    edited 2006-07-11 03:31
    Different stuff to the FRAM from RAMTRON.· RAMTRON's memory uses ferroelectric crystals, which are based on an electrostatic effect, not magnetic, despite the ferro in the name, no iron was harmed in the making of the FRAM.

    From the sound of it, the Motorola (oops, Freescale) ram actually uses magnetic states to store the 1s and 0s.· Like the old magnetic core memory, except I'm thinking it is non destructive read out, since they use the change in resistance of some element in the cell that responds to magnetic fields in an absolute sense, not just to a change in field strength.

    I wonder if they have to build a shield into the package...

    And I wonder how much power they consume to change a bit compared to FRAM?

    More competition means lower prices down the line, unless one company or the other starves to death.




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    MRC
  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2006-07-11 04:02
    They're clearly appealing to a different market (not microcontrollers). The chip is 16-bit (x 256K) parallel rather than RAMTRON's 8-bit (x 32K) serial and parallel memories. It is a non-destructive read-out with a funny kind of write mechanism that toggles bits rather than sets them. It sounds like they have to read before writing to see what has to be written. There's a white paper and a spec on the website <http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MR2A16A&nodeId=015424>.
  • Beau SchwabeBeau Schwabe Posts: 6,568
    edited 2006-07-11 04:38
    From an IC layout perspective...· When I worked for National Semiconductor, memory structures were usually contracted
    through some other company or a specialized division within the company.· We gave them the size and dimensions of the
    memory structure that we wanted in the application, and in return during the fabrication process the memory block was
    applied.· The·main reason·is because in most processes NV memory breaks many of the standard layout rules and requires
    special·handling of additional layers not available·within the custom layout environment.
    ·


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    Beau Schwabe

    IC Layout Engineer
    Parallax, Inc.
  • LoopyBytelooseLoopyByteloose Posts: 12,537
    edited 2006-07-11 13:17
    Freescale is providing automotive CANbus drivers for GM and others. This could be an automotive OEM product.

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    "If you want more fiber, eat the package.· Not enough?· Eat the manual."········
    ···················· Tropical regards,····· G. Herzog [noparse][[/noparse]·黃鶴 ]·in Taiwan
  • PJAllenPJAllen Banned Posts: 5,065
    edited 2006-07-11 13:51
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5164110.stm
  • PJAllenPJAllen Banned Posts: 5,065
    edited 2006-07-23 00:10
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5202486.stm

    Hailed as "the most significant memory invention of the decade", magnetoresistive random-access memory or Mram could one day overthrow hard discs and flash memory.

    A couple of weeks ago a company called Freescale announced that it had produced a working Mram chip which can hold four-megabits, that is about half a megabyte.
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