Major breakthrough in Random Access Memory was reported by Texan-based company Freescale Seminconductor on Monday, pushing the limits of data storage to unseen limits and bringing a solution to a problem that has lasted in the IT industry for more than a decade.

The most important improvement the new memory chip features is its capacity to store data while powered down. The new chip combines both the endurance and long life-span of the common RAM from today and the ability to keep information on its microcircuits active, without electricity passing through it. The later represents a major breakthrough in the hardware industry, since it has been sort of a Holy Grail for many IT giants like IBM, Toshiba or NEC.

According to company’s declaration, being able to provide to the end-users such a new, powerful and long awaited memory chip is a great achievement.

Will Strauss, an analyst with research firm Forward Concepts said that “This is the most significant memory introduction in this decade.” Strauss added that, “This is radically new technology. People have been dabbling in this for years, but nobody has been able to make it in volume.”

“With the commercialization of MRAM, Freescale is the first-to-market with a technology of tremendous possibilities and profound implications,” said Bob Merritt, Semico Research. “Competition to become the first company to market MRAM technology was fierce. This is a significant achievement that certainly confirms the dedication of Freescale’s engineering team.�?

The Texan corporation also announced that within two months the new chip will hit the market. Prices for it have not yet been announced.

In a press release, Sumit Sadana, senior vice president, Strategy and Business Development, and Chief Technology Officer, Freescale, said that “The commercial launch of the industry’s first MRAM product is a major milestone made possible by the pioneering research of Freescale technologists. It underscores our commitment to deliver breakthrough technology to our customers to address real-world challenges. The unique capabilities of MRAM technology have numerous exciting applications in our target markets.�?

Freescale’s four megabit (Mbit) MRAM product is a fast, non-volatile memory with unlimited endurance - a combination of characteristics not available in any other individual semiconductor memory product. The device is built on a foundation of technology protected by more than 100 Freescale patents, including toggle-bit switching.

MRAM uses magnetic materials combined with conventional silicon circuitry to deliver the speed of SRAM with the non-volatility of Flash in a single, high endurance device. Freescale’s successful commercialization of this technology could hasten new classes of electronic products offering dramatic advances in size, cost, power consumption and system performance.

The first commercial MRAM product, called the MR2A16A, is appropriate for a variety of commercial applications such as networking, security, data storage, gaming and printers. The part is engineered to be a reliable, economical, single-component replacement for battery-backed SRAM units. The device also could be used in cache buffers, configuration storage memories and other applications that require the speed, endurance and non-volatility of MRAM.

Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) is a non-volatile computer memory (NVRAM) technology, which has been in development since the 1990s. Continued increases in density of existing memory technologies, notably Flash RAM and DRAM kept MRAM in a niche role in the market, but its proponents believe that the advantages are so overwhelming that MRAM will eventually become dominant.

Unlike conventional RAM chip technologies, data is not stored as electric charge or current flows, but by magnetic storage elements. The elements are formed from two ferromagnetic plates, each of which can hold a magnetic field, separated by a thin insulating layer. One of the two plates is a permanent magnet set to a particular polarity, the other’s field will change to match that of an external field. A memory device is built from a grid of such “cells”.

MRAM requires no refresh at any time. Not only does this mean it retains its memory with the power turned off, but also that there is no constant power draw. Additionally, the read process requires less power than the same process in a DRAM, although the write process requires about eight times the power as reading[3]. Although the exact amount of power savings depends on the nature of the work – more frequent writing will require more power – in general MRAM proponents expect much lower power consumption (up to 99% less!!!).

With the launch of the new chip Freescale managed to offer an answer to a delicate problem that not even IBM could solve entirely. Still, it is IBM researchers’ merit to have demonstrated that MRAM can be six times faster than the industry standard DRAM. The differences compared to Flash are far more significant, as much as thousands of times faster for writes.