Freescale Semiconductor has done what no one else has been able to do, they have brought MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) to market. Technology review has a very informative story here. I'm pleased that it was Freescale that produced this chip. They're somewhat dear to my heart as one of the two companies that produced the PowerPC chips used (until recently) by Apple computer.

But the fascinating thing about this development is that MRAM is nonvolatile not only in respect to power loss, but also to time. In other words, it would make a great "hard drive" for a no moving parts computer. It doesn't suffer degradation over time the way flash memory does, and, unlike flash memory, and it accesses in nanoseconds instead of hundreds of nanoseconds the way flash RAM does. The one downfall is that right now the chips max out at 4 megabytes. But there is hope that the capacity can be increased 100 fold, which would make an instant-on, no moving parts computer a real possibility. Since there would be no need for a hard drive, battery life would increase dramatically for laptops. Another energy saving feature of MRAM is it's ability, like flash RAM, to keep data without a constant supply of power. That means that anytime RAM isn't being accessed, MRAM doesn't need to be supplied with power.

It's not all fast and easy, though. The magnetic fields required to set the memory and the materials used in the chips may not scale well to chips with smaller feature sizes. The magnetic fields used have distinctive shapes and it may be difficult to find shapes that work with smaller sizes and/or other materials.

But even with the potential problems, this is a huge accomplishment, and could change computing as we know it.

Blogged with Flock