"With the commercialization of MRAM, Freescale is the first to market with a technology of tremendous possibilities and profound implications," Bob Merritt, of research firm Semico Research, said in a statement. "Competition to become the first company to market MRAM technology was fierce. This is a significant achievement that certainly confirms the dedication of Freescale's engineering team."
Freescale, a company spun off from Motorola's chip unit in 2004, unveiled its MR2A16A Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) device on Monday. The Austin, Texas-based company promises its chip can read or write data in 35 nanoseconds, and can even store data after the computer has been powered down. Supporters of the technology say it could even replace data-shuttling technology such as flash memory and DRAM.
Flash memory reads binary data "1s" or "0s" based on the absence or presence of electrons in a cell. MRAM, by comparison, creates a tiny magnetic field that is measured by the computer to determine whether the individual cells should be read as a 1 or 0, using a lot less power in the process.
Right now, the technology's biggest obstacle is its sizable price tag, which is $25 for low-volume 4MB MRAM, the only size available at wholesale. In contrast, customers only pay $34 for 512-megabyte DRAM chips at retail.
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