Memory is ubiquitous and fundamental to all computing systems, yet incumbent technologies are still dominant, mostly unchanged for decades but facing increasingly higher hurdles placed by Moore’s Law. SOT’s unique and revolutionary attributes combine performance and reliability requirements for both RAM and NVM applications.
* Non-volatile
* Fast enough to match logic speed
* High endurance for reliable cache/buffering
* Easy to process for low cost on-chip integration
Spin Orbit Torque Magnetic Random-Access Memory
Overview
Key Features
- With the advent of mobile and handheld electronic devices, the demand for much smaller, faster and ultra-low power systems keeps growing. Yet to meet such needs, the microelectronics industry cannot rely anymore on following Moore’s law like it has for the last decades.
- Embedded memories, which represent a major part of the circuits silicon area have now become a major contributor to power dissipation in integrated system circuits. To solve these issues, several technologies are intensively investigated to replace existing embedded memories (SRAM and Flash).
- Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic Random Access Memory (STT-MRAM) has been chosen by the industry as the non-volatile memory technology of choice to replace Embedded Flash at advanced technology nodes.
Benefits
- The absence of high-voltage stress on the device allows for practically infinite SOT-MRAM endurance even at the fastest, sub-ns write speeds. Furthermore, SOT-switching does not need to rely on thermal activation to initiate switching, which makes reliable sub-ns switching with no incubation delays inherently feasible. As a result, SOT-MRAM may be used as DRAM-like working memory or SRAM-like cache memory, which is impossible with STT-MRAM.
Technical Specifications
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