Freescale Semiconductor Inc. has made a big splash in the news yesterday with the announcement that they have started commercial shipments of MRAM chips.
What does this mean to you?
Well, MRAM is a sort of holy grail of memory technology that has been pursued since the 1990's. It's fast, cheap to produce, consumes less power than conventional memory, and remembers its data when power is removed.
It could be used to replace the flash memory in digital cameras, mobile phones, and MP3/Media players in order to speed up the devices (particularily in digital cameras, when you're taking several pictures in burst mode) and extend the battery life. The existing Flash memory currently requires extra power to write data to the memory, and suffers from a limited number of memory writes before the memory needs to be replaced. MRAM doesn't have these limitations.
It could also be used to replace the memory found in desktop and laptop computers, where you will also benefit from increased speed and lower power consumption. You will also be able to turn your computer off completely (not just in standby or hybernation mode) and then turn it back on and pick up exactly where you left off without sitting through the boot process.
As storage capacity increases with this memory technology, it would be ideal for replacing small hard drives with solid state drives. This would be ideal for ultra-mobile PCs which need to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their batteries.
In fact, the only current memory technology that MRAM couldn't replace is SRAM, which is the very fast but very expensive memory used inside computer processors as local cache memory.
When will you be seeing the effects of this new technology?
Although the new memory chips are commercially shipping now, they don't have the capacity yet to be used for the above applications. The current chips are four megabit chips, whereas we would require chips approaching gigabit capacity before they could start to replace current memory technologies.
I would expect to see MRAM chips first turn up in places where you would find an embedded processor, such as in televisions, DVD players, home applicances, networking equipment, and industrial machines. After that, MRAM will start showing up in mobile phones and handheld PDAs before it starts to replace Flash memory cards.
Fortunately, Freescale Semiconductor isn't the only company developing the technology, so I would expect the storage capacity to continue increasing in the next two to five years until this technology is ready to start replacing current memory technologies.