Future Media

Carbon nanotube memory (NRAM) promises to be that disruptive memory you’ve dreamed about: DRAM class performance in a non-volatile memory. Across all applications, from SSD through NVDIMM, and from consumer and IoT through enterprise level architectures, replacing not only all volatile memory but also the energy store subsystems of supercapacitors and batteries, NRAM is the inflection point for high performance, low power, low weight, ultra-small solutions.

After 50 years from the inventions of SRAM and DRAM and 30 from that of NAND Flash, the semiconductor memory industry is in the throes of disruption. NAND has already made the transition to 3-D while DRAM approaches its scaling brick wall. Attempts are being made to fill the latency/persistence/cost “gap” in the memory hierarchy between DRAM and NAND with new types of solid-state memories.

This presentation will explain how MRAM will migrate from its existing emerging niche of embedded nonvolatile memory to form a fundamentally important technology for Persistent Memory not only in the “gap” but also as SRAM replacement. The keys to this migration involve both important circuit/system design and magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) innovations without which MRAM would languish in its existing memory niche.