Jun

10

EverSpin - The new MRAM company

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A new dedicated MRAM company has been formed- Freescale Semiconductor, one of early champions in MRAM technology, has decided to spin off its MRAM unit (Ref). The new company will be called Everspin and even has a website already. Everspin will focus on standalone and embedded products based on the Freescale’s proprietary MRAM technology. It has successfully secured $20 million startup investment from various VC firms, including New Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Lux Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Epic Ventures (Ref). I think the spin-off is not at all surprising since MRAM is never a core business in Freescale. Given the current financial woes of Freescale, it is quite naturally for them to spin off or sell off the non-core business units. Everspin, now with MRAM as their core business, will now have a better chance to bring the MRAM to the mass market where Freescale has failed to do so since its launch of 4Mb MRAM in 2006.

MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) was once touted as a likely candidate to replace DRAM and Flash due to its inherent high density, low cost and faster access speed. However, DRAM and Flash remain strong with some room to scale down. Therefore, it will take some time for MRAM to take off. The MRAM technology was originally developed at Motorola’s research labs under a DARPA-funded research grant in 1995. In 2000, Motorola established a 200mm wafer fabrication facility in Chandler, AZ. Motorola demonstrated its first 256Kb and 1Mb MRAM test chips in 2002. The following year, Motorola shipped its first 4Mb MRAM engineering samples. In 2005, Motorola Semiconductor became Freescale Semiconductor when it was spun-off from Motorola. Freescale announced the world’s first 4Mb MRAM product in 2006 (Ref).

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Apr

24

Memory Industry Shakeout

Filed Under Memory and Storage, Video Gallery | Leave a Comment

Almost all the memory makers are making a huge loss in Q1. This has prompted quite a big shakeout in the memory industry. For example,
amid a huge financial loss in Q1, Qimonda has announced a 10 percent cut in workforce, slashed its R&D costs significantly, terminated a joint development in Flash technology with Marconix (Ref) and instead established a new technology partnership with Elpida in new DRAM technology(Ref). Recently, it also signed a foundry deal with Winbond for 65nm buried wordline technology. Apparently, Qimonda is dropping the trench-capacitor technology and in favor stacked-capacitor technology (Ref). On the other hand, it was rumored that Infineon, which holds 77.5 per cent of Qimonda’s stake, may sell its Qimonda’s stake to Micron, Hynix or Elpida. If this is the case, it will be an interesting turn of event (Ref).

Powerchip and Nanya, Taiwan’s biggest and second-largest memory-chip makers by revenue, have also reported huge losses in Q1 (Ref). Not long ago, Nanya and Micron announced a joint venture on DRAM manufactured using stacked-cell technology. The newly formed company is called MeiYa Technology (Ref).

For more interesting insight into the memory industry, I recommend Gregory Wong’s blog forward-insights.blogspot.com. Gregory Wong is President of Forward Insights, a consulting and market research company focusing on non-volatile semiconductor memories.

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