Samsung Electronics said on Thursday that it plans to expand the application of magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM).
MRAM stores data in magnetic domains, unlike most RAMs that store them in electric charge or current flows.
The company improved the magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) function of its MRAM to make it applicable in more areas, Han Shin-hee, principle engineer at Samsung Foundry, said at Semicon Korea.
Samsung will expand the application of MRAM to automotive, wearable, graphic memory, low level cache, internet of things and edge artificial intelligence, the engineer said.
The company was able to meet the requirements of MTJ patterning without decreases in shunt and speed, Han said. Failure rate was 100ppm, a significant improvement than before, the engineer said.
The electrical resistance in MRAM differs depending on whether the two ferromagnetic plates are parallel or antiparallel. MTJ patterning is crucial in improving performance and reliability of MRAM.
Samsung said it developed the MRAM die to be 40% smaller than SRAM. The company aims to have read and write speed under 20ns. Samsung’s MRAM chip published on IEDM was 0.08mm2/Mbit in size. SRAM made in the same process was sized 0.15mm2/Mbit, and Samsung succeed in reduce in the chip surface area by near half for the MRAM. The MRAM also had a read and write speed of 30 to 50ns. It had write speed a thousand times faster than an embedded flash memory.
According to Yole Development, the worldwide MRAM market is expected to be worth US$1.2 billion in 2024.
Samsung applied embedded MRAM based on 28nm FD-SOI process on microcontrollers and system-on-a-chip since 2019. NXP is its customer.
