Has anyone heard of MRAM? Or other memories like it?

jason87x

Solid State Member
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MRAM... non volatile, reasonably fast (35 ns), actually available now by Everspin (so far up to 2 MB products). While not big enough in capacity to store everything you ever wanted in there... perhaps it could get use in a smaller system, having the programs stored and run on the same memory chip.

Now how would that affect programming? A memory leak could seriously corrupt other programs because they are being stored in that memory, the RAM / Hard Drive separation of every other system makes it so a memory leak is nondestructive (giving the green light for programmers to program like crap). How does one cope?

Also it seems that if your processor speed isn't too fast, you could make this a memory to memory CPU architecture, without crazy register schemes. Would a stack architecture then be good for this?
 
It's basically core memory shrunk down to microscopic size. I highly doubt such a thing will ever be cost-effective for consumer PCs, but I imagine it'll be pretty useful for microcontrollers and applications requiring very high reliability.

IMO, T-RAM is probably the future. It's static as well, but it can be fabbed at 32nm and should become almost as cheap as DRAM soon.
 
when will T-RAM products actually be available though? Everspin already sells MRAM and so are the only ones to actually prove they have something real going on. Every other company for the most part has been all talk and no product.
 
when will T-RAM products actually be available though? Everspin already sells MRAM and so are the only ones to actually prove they have something real going on. Every other company for the most part has been all talk and no product.

MRAM is still far too expensive, and is only available in very small capacities. It's been available since the '90s but only for very specific applications, not typical consumer PCs mainly because of high cost and problems with manufacturing. According to Wikipedia, it gets buggy when shrunk below 180nm.

AMD has already licensed the use of T-RAM, so it can be expected relatively soon. I expect it to be available in microprocessors and such at first, before making its way to PCs.
 
There's been loads of different RAM technologies that have appeared over the years, being hailed as the next greatest thing and then disappearing a few years later. Anyone here old enough to remember bubble memory? That was set to replace existing RAM, hard drives, tape drives and everything back in the 70's but fell absolutely flat on its face a decade later.

I daresay something will emerge sooner or later that will replace conventional RAM, but I'm very sceptical of any one technology claiming to have it sorted - just need to look back at history to see how many people tried and failed by doing things that way.
 
Well... where can I find more info about T-RAM? Are there actual commercial chips out there? In what kind of capacities?
 
Well... where can I find more info about T-RAM? Are there actual commercial chips out there? In what kind of capacities?

Just google thrysistor RAM...

As far as I know, there isn't anything currently out, but a few very large chip maxers have licensed it, so it can be expected in the coming years.


Might I ask why you want T-RAM? I'm sure anything you're working on would be fine with current technologies, such as SRAM.
 
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