MRAM (magnetic random-access memory) is a
relatively old technology which is seeing a dramatic surge in
technological advancement over the past several months. It uses
"magelectric alloys" whose magnetic properties can be changed via the
application of electric current, and whose magnetic properties can
control its electric conductance, making a magelectric cell a sort of
persistent-state nondestructively read transistor.
What this means is potentially very dense and
very fast non-volatile memory. The impact this could have on
computer technology at every level can hardly be overstated! At
the very least, this technology could mean very large (4+ MB) on-die L2
caches for commodity ($200) desktop microprocessors, extremely large
(16+ MB) on-die L2 caches for big-iron (POWER, SPARC, Alpha, MIPS) server
and mainframe microprocessors, very large (16+ MB) persistent memories
for embedded devices (cellphones, beepers, digital cameras, et al), the
elimination of separate RAM and ROM components in FPGAs and ASICs,
high-speed reconfigurations of FPGAs, and much more!
It seems like every month a different laboratory
announces that it has discovered yet another magelectric alloy to play
with which gives them the ability to fashion faster and faster MRAM
devices. Being a geekly sort of geek, this has made me very very
excited! I have collected documents about MRAM as I have found them,
and have organized them below. I seem to have misplaced my PDF for
IBM's MRAM document, but I will endeavor to recover it.
* MicroMem Inc is rumored to have a 300MHz MRAM device. (HTML)
* NonVolatile Electronics is ramping up new, fast MRAM production right now. (11KB, HTML)
* NVE technical paper on MRAM technology. (307KB, PDF)
* MRAM Slashdot discussion, stored in "Threshold 1, Flat" format. (130KB, HTML)
* WIRED article on IBM's MRAM development efforts (31KB, HTML).