Toshiba develops MRAM for smartphones

The Japanese conglomerate Toshiba said its MRAM chips could reduce by two thirds the consumption of mobile devices.

 Toshiba has developed a version of the low power MRAM (magnetoresistive random access memory), the group will reduce by two thirds the energy consumption of mobile processors. The company said Monday that MRAM could be used in smartphones as cache for mobile processors, replacing the SRAM ((Static Random Access Memory) that is widespread today.

"Recently, the amount of SRAM used by the processors of mobile applications has increased, which has increased the energy consumption," said the spokesman for Toshiba, Atsushi Ido. "This research is focused on reducing energy consumption while increasing speed, as opposed to the increased amount of memory.

Reduce power consumption in mobile devices is a priority for equipment manufacturers, heat and life of the battery part of the major concerns of consumers. MRAM used for the caches will be of the order of several megabytes of storage. It uses magnetic storage to keep track of the bits, unlike most current technologies RAM, which use electrical charges. Nonvolatile, it retains its data even without power, but usually requires more power to operate at high speeds.

Use of technology spin-torque

Toshiba said that the fruit of his research was based on the technology spin-torque, in which the electron spin is used to define the orientation of its magnetic bits, reducing the workload required for data writes. Its chips use elements that are smaller than 30 nm. Atsushi Ido said there would be no time limit for its MRAM cache makes its entry.

In addition, the manufacturer is also working with Hynix to develop MRAM for the next generation of products. The manufacturer has announced its intention to promote terminals that combine several memory technologies such as MRAM and NAND flash.

Last month EVERSPIN announced that it had delivered the first MRAM chip ST (Spin-Torque) globally to replace the DRAM. The company said that its chips serve as a buffer in SSD, and would be used particularly in data centers.

Toshiba will present his research at the International Meeting of the IEEE Electron Devices (IEDM) being held this week in San Francisco and focuses on semiconductor technology. The IEEE is an organization that promotes research, particularly in electrical engineering.