2023 MRAM Forum Shows MRAM For Automotive And Other Applications

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www.forbes.com, Dec. 20, 2023 – 

At the 2023 MRAM Forum, an IEEE Magnetics Society sponsored event tied to the 2023 International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco there were some good insights into the evolution of MRAM (and other non-volatile) solid state memories and their applications by the major players in the MRAM market. There were talks by NXP, Samsung, Global Foundries, Netsol, Everspin, Numem, Kioxia, TSMC, YODA-S and UCLA (as well as Everspin and Numem).

Thomas Jew from NXP, Johannes Muller from Global Foundries and Junghoon Bak from Samsung spoke about MRAM for automotive applications. This promises to be an important growth market for embedded MRAM and enable moving to domain and zone-based automotive architectures, controlled by software as shown below. Thomas Jew said that automotive designs are moving from domain-based, where electronics is focused on particular discrete functions to one where software and distributed intelligence are enabling more flexible and capable automotive electronics and creating architectures optimized for software defined vehicles.

Daniel Worledge, IBM Distinguished Research Scientist, one of the organizers of the MRAM Forum told me that "Embedded STT-MRAM has successfully replaced embedded Flash at all advanced foundry nodes. Over the next few years we will see the automotive MCU/SoC suppliers switch to using eMRAM – in about three years, almost every new car will have eMRAM inside."

Large system MRAM in a car can be organized into independent partitions for concurrent access by different CPUs and computational threads as shown below from the NXP talk. By using MRAM for code and data storage applications software development is simplified. Compared to the complexities and additional operations needed to manage NOR flash, MRAM simplifies non-volatile storage and uses less energy.

Over the air updates (OTA) are also simplified using MRAM and MRAM's fast write minimizes downtime and facilitates software roll-backs if required. The need for smaller features than NOR can provide (28nm is minimum embedded NOR feature size) and the movement of automotive electronics to 16nm nodes are also opening up opportunities for MRAM introduction. Currently 22nm MRAM are qualified and running in production, but smaller feature products are on the way. 64MB MRAM is hard with flash but MRAM could make that size memory possible and thus enable more capable automotives.

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