Wham bam, thank you, MRAM
Samsung this week claimed it is mass-producing and commercially shipping embedded magnetic RAM (eMRAM) to replace EEPROM, SRAM, and NAND memories in embedded electronics.
NAND flash memory is increasingly unable to meet today’s embedded controllers’ speed and density needs. There is no Optane-class technology for this particular industry, and so Samsung has been developing non-volatile random-access eMRAM to scratch an itch in this space.
The Samsung eMRAM is built with a 28nm silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) process technology called 28FDS. It is a resistive memory: if a binary bit cell has high resistance, it contains a 1, and low resistance stores a zero.
The resistance is defined by setting the magnetic north-south orientation of two ferromagnetic electrical films that are separated by a very thin barrier, an arrangement that forms a magnetic tunnel junction. Seeing as the orientation affects the junction’s resistance, it therefore affects how much current can flow across the junction, which is sensed as the cell’s binary value of 1 or 0.
