MRAM - thoughts?

[revolutn]

I try to stay not only current, but a step ahead of the game....but boy have I been asleep at the switch with this technology:

So I'm home sick from work last week and to avoid the CRAP that is daytime television (no wonder this county is in decline) I end up surfing channels like Discovery, National Geographic, Science etc etc.

I come across this show on History channel of all things called something like Personal Computers.

They're discussing this technology called MRAM and the properties sound amazing, the cure for all that currently ales our memory woes.

The show says "MRAM is the next big thing in computer memory"

So I think, hmm this is interesting....hit the INFO button on the remote and find out that it was produced in 2002!

I was like wtf?
6 years after a documentary is produced which cites some technology as the 'next big thing' and I've not heard of it before? What happened? Did it run up against some technological hurdle that was insurmountable or why the devil haven't I heard about this before?

Mind you I was well up on such technologies as currently are the standard in our market, like Flash RAM before there were really any commercial applications utilizing it.


So what is MRAM already you ask?
Imagine non volital memory like flash is today but with magnetic properties like current Hard Drives. It would appear to have all the benefits of Flash with non of the negatives.

Imagine a PC or any other CE device that literally instantly booted to your OS desktop because the data was INSTANTLY loaded and available upon power on, would not fail from excessive cell writes, had no physical moving parts to crash or damage, could instantly flip bits from 0 to 1 and back again without the huge latency and charge time involved with current flash memory and on and on I could go.


After a little research it seems as good old business cycle and profit motives are the real reason MRAM hasn't come to market yet.

So as not to overly confound anyone who (like myself until recently) never heard of MRAM let me suggest this broad overview from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...e_Random_Access_Memory

So the question is:
What do you all think of this?
have you heard about it previously, and do you think it's as exciting a technological (r)evolution as I do at this point?

And if so, what can we do to bring pressure to bear on the memory industry to hasten the last leg of development and begin production so that we can stop wasting our money on inferior memory products?

Rev

 

[myocardia]

That's interesting, but it looks like it's a bit too large to be used as an SDRAM replacement. 2GB sticks of RAM are now the norm, and it won't be long before the already available 4GB sticks take their place. I'd love to have 500GB of it as a hard drive replacement, though.

 

[revolutn]

Originally posted by: myocardia
That's interesting, but it looks like it's a bit too large to be used as an SDRAM replacement. 2GB sticks of RAM are now the norm, and it won't be long before the already available 4GB sticks take their place. I'd love to have 500GB of it as a hard drive replacement, though.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'too large' except that I am guessing you mean the density is presently pretty low, which is based largely on the fact that it's still being produced on old fab technology, which was part of my original point.

It seems as if the original technological limitations of die shrink for MRAM was solved by STT, so....it seems to me (from my limited reading so far) as if the only reason we aren't getting MRAM to market is that suppliers are dedicating all resources to producing DRAM and SRAM because that's where demand is.

I'm just thinking that the first major memory producer to break away from the pack and dedicate a MODERN (or retrofitted old) production fab to MRAM would stand to really profit.

Rev