Iddo Genuth from the highly recommended The Future of Things sent us a link to an article he did about MRAM, a new type of memory that combines the advantages of volatile and non-volatile memory. He writes:
“In early July 2006, Freescale Semiconductor announced the first commercial availability of a new type of memory with the potential to surpass most existing types in terms of speed, power consumption, and durability…”
“In an attempt to combine the speed of the faster volatile memory with the benefits of non-volatile memory, Freescale (which originated from Motorola Semiconductor about two years ago) created a new type of non-volatile memory – Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory, or MRAM. The roots of MRAM can be traced back to the 1940’s at Harvard when physicists An Wang and Way-Dong Woo and later Jay Forrester and colleagues at MIT worked on developments that led to Magnetic Core Memory and later on to the discovery of the “giant magnetoresistive effect” in thin-film structures by researchers from IBM in the late 1980’s. Like Flash, MRAM retains data after a power supply is cut off, potentially eliminating that seemingly endless boot time of conventional computers when data from the hard drive is transferred to RAM, as well as loss of data when the computer is suddenly shut off. MRAM has much faster write speeds than Flash and has an unlimited endurance, meaning that MRAM is not subject to the degradation suffered by Flash.”
Read the rest of the piece here.
Thanks, Iddo!
