Ask the CEO
MRAM is a different kind of technology and Everspin is not your typical company. To help our users understand more about who we are and what we do, we're providing a forum to ask our CEO.
On a regular basis, Everspin's CEO, Sanjeev Aggarwal, will answer questions submitted from customers, partners, and those in the industry specifically focused on our products, business, strategy, and vision. You can follow the discussions below, or request your own questions by submitting them via this form.
What does the announcement of the EMxxLX Family of STT-MRAM products mean for Everspin?
The EMxxLX family is the highest performing discrete persistent memory in the industry with up to 400MB/s of read and write bandwidth. We have taken steps to make this product easy to design-in for our customers by using the standard xSPI octal protocol, standard packages, and eliminating any need for endurance wear-leveling or external error correction. It represents the decisive move to make our STT-MRAM technology suitable for industrial markets with enhanced temperature, endurance and data retention as compared to earlier STT-MRAM products. Production availability now means that our customers can take full advantage of the performance and reliability of this new offering in their industrial, aerospace, storage, networking, transportation, IoT and edge, AI, metering, and infrastructure systems that all demand the highest of data integrity over the life of the systems in harsh environments. Additionally, we have matched the command protocol for serial NOR Flash memories which gives customers the option to use MRAM in FPGA based system for very fast configurations and performance advantages with the extremely fast writing capability, 1000x times faster than worst case NOR programming speeds. Announcing production availability of the EMxxLX is a big milestone for Everspin, but more importantly for our customers that will take advantage of the performance, backed by the strong reputation for reliability for our products.
What is MRAM?
Everspin’s MRAM is the world’s most durable non-volatile memory, combining very high read/write cycle endurance with byte addressability and persistence. It can be manufactured as a discrete memory as with Everspin products, or can be embedded in System-On-a-Chip (SOC) designs.
MRAM is a magnetoresistive random-access memory that stores data in magnetic domains. The polarization of the magnetic domain causes a change in resistance that is used to determine the zero and one values of the data stored.
What is the current vision for Everspin and MRAM?
From data centers to edge devices, data processing demands and evolution in computing drive the growing need for a reliable, persistent memory with high performance, endurance, and system power savings. We believe that MRAM is the ideal memory technology to meet this growing need, offering persistence, endurance, byte-addressability and speed in a single product. In data centers, the latencies involved in the acknowledgement of securing data transfers can be greatly reduced by using high-density MRAM for write buffering. In widely deployed IoT edge devices, storing data in persistent memory allows systems to avoid data storage operations as well as lengthy boot times which both are very costly from a power perspective. We are driving the performance and endurance of our products to be the ideal universal memory.
Everspin has been developing MRAM for around 20 years, what is it about either your history or depth of product/manufacturing knowledge that gives you such a lead in the industry?
For more than two decades, Everspin R&D has been focused not only on the fundamental materials for MRAM but also on developing the technology for manufacturability, moving the MRAM industry forward through product delivery. Our commercial success comes from our deep understanding of the technology and having the know-how to provide margin in the manufacturing process that is needed to produce a high-yield memory device. We then combine this technical and operational strength with an uncompromising focus on our customer needs for performance, quality and reliability. We have delivered more than 125 million units to some of the world’s most demanding companies across multiple market segments, such as industrial automation, transportation, mil-aero, enterprise storage, gaming and medical as a result of our leadership.
You are predicting that MRAM will become a universal memory. How do you define a universal memory?
It isn’t only Everspin making this prediction. The industry has a long history of looking at MRAM as a promising technology to provide a universal memory. A universal memory is a single, high- performance non-volatile memory that can serve as both execute-in-place code and program data storage. Long-term data persistence and read performance are needed for code storage and execution while RAM-like performance with high endurance is needed for data. With its high data retention lasting from ten to twenty years, data can be kept in MRAM without the need to move to storage I/O memory.
Why is Everspin the lead candidate to get to a universal memory? What is Everspin’s current roadmap to universal memory?
We already produce Toggle MRAM which is technically a universal memory providing high performance and endurance for code storage and long-term data storage for a wide array of embedded CPU applications. We have successfully mass produced a higher density 256Mb STT-MRAM and have ushered in the Gigabit era for MRAM with the announcement of production of our 1Gb ST-DDR4 memory. With our 1Gb STT-MRAM now providing 10-year data retention and high endurance, we have taken an important step to an ideal universal memory technology for high density applications. Longer term, we see a path to even higher endurance and memory densities coupled with higher performance which will broaden MRAM’s opportunities in high density universal memory applications.