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Computer Memory: Researchers Work to Develop Fast, Dense, Nonvolatile MRAM
The goal of memory chip makers is to be able to fabricate a memory product that is nonvolatile, fast, dense, and cheap. Current SRAM memory is fast. Flash memory is dense. And read-only memory (ROM) is cheap. But creating memory that has all these characteristics has so far eluded memory chip makers. But now, a technology called magnetic random access memory (MRAM) may hold the secret.
MRAM is based on being able to controls the magnetic ‘spin’ properties of electrons. With MRAM, the direction of electron spin is used to hold data. Upwards spin represents ‘1’, and downwards spin ‘0’. Standard memory requires an electrical charge while MRAM is based on magnetism. That means that even when the power is turned off, the memory state is permanently retained. Another advantage of MRAM is that it uses significantly less power which would means that devices like smartphones would be able to have longer battery lives.
While there has been excitement around MRAM for some time, the methods used up until now for ‘flipping’ the spin of the electron have not been reliable and the magnetic field required to perform the flip has been expensive. But now researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have developed a method that may be able to solve this problem. They describe the approach as ‘bending current’ and it is enabled by using an anti-ferromagnetic material. The new method is energy efficient and low cost. One of the researchers on the project, Arno van den Brink, said that “this could be the decisive nudge in the right direction for superfast MRAM in the near future.”
