MRAM makes surprise re-appearance

IT WAS ALL the rage a few years ago and then quietly slipped into desuetude. Or so you might have thought.

Because magneto resistive random access memory (MRAM) appears to be making a comeback again.

According to nikkei.net, the non-volatile memory type is being resurrected by NEC, which is prototyping a 150 nanometre circuit ticking and tocking at 250MHz, not far off the venerable SRAM.

DRAM is cheap as chips but MRAM is a very low power kind of a beast, helping things to boot that much quicker because such chips don’t need power in the wait state.

Toshiba is also experimenting with MRAM devices that can store gigabits, said the report.

There’s more here (subscription required). µ

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