This week, Chris and Martin dig deeper into storage media and look at magneto-resistive RAM, commonly known as MRAM in this conversation with Joe O’Hare, Director of Distribution and Product Marketing at Everspin Technologies.
MRAM is a persistent memory technology that uses resistance to determine the state of data. Everspin, the leading provider of MRAM technologies offers two product types – Toggle and Spin Transfer Torque. These two solutions provide different characteristics of endurance and scaling, but both offer low latency reads and writes at around 35 nanoseconds.
MRAM is already finding uses in embedded solutions, where Toggle offers opportunities for IoT and industrial devices. With a relatively low level of scalability, Toggle isn’t likely to migrate to the enterprise. Instead, STT provides greater scalability with the trade-off of reduced endurance (although we should say, nowhere near the poor endurance levels of NAND flash). Today, we already see STT MRAM embedded in IBM FlashCore drives as a replacement for super-capacitors.
This conversation is interesting as it highlights the complementary nature of technologies like MRAM in improving the capabilities of existing persistent storage technologies. You can learn more at www.everspin.com.
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Timeline
- 00:00:00 – Intros
- 00:01:15 – Persistent memory and MRAM – what is it?
- 00:02:45 – MRAM has high endurance – like DRAM
- 00:03:15 – MRAM needs to offer low latency
- 00:05:45 – What are the two types of MRAM?
- 00:08:15 – 35 nanosecond read/write cycle on MRAM
- 00:11:00 – Toggle offers much greater endurance than STT
- 00:14:45 – STT products are already in enterprise drives
- 00:16:15 – IBM uses MRAM in FlashCore devices
- 00:18:00 – Could MRAM make SMR and QLC/PLC drives more efficient?
- 00:20:15 – MRAM will also be used on SmartNICs
- 00:22:30 – What non-enterprise application are there for MRAM?
- 00:23:15 – MRAM will be embedded in SoCs and ASICs
- 00:26:30 – MRAM will comply with the SPI interface
- 00:28:30 – What does the future hold?
- 00:30:45 – Wrap Up
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Joe’s Bio
Joe has had a rewarding career working in the semiconductor industry at companies such as TI, Lucent Microelectronics, Agere Systems and now Everspin Technologies. He has held a variety of engineering, marketing and executive positions with a focus on developing products for the storage industry, both magnetic and solid state. As marketing director at Everspin Technologies, Joe is leading the effort to define and launch a new class of MRAM memory that is targeted at storage and industrial applications where performance and persistence are featured.
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