Samsung has begun to produce low-consumption eMRAM memory chip whose speed is 1000 times faster than that of eFlash.

Introduction: Good news on storage from Samsung has been constant recently. Samsung has released eUFS 3.0 memory chip with a capacity of 512GB at MWC2019. Yesterday, it announced mass production of the first commercial eMRAM memory chip, which will bring new vitality to the memory chip market.
Samsung announced yesterday that it will produce its first commercial eMRAM (embedded magnetic random access memory) by using 28FDS (28nm FD-SOI) process. As the development of eFlash flash technology has reached a bottleneck, this kind of memory based on charge storage has faced many challenges. However, eMRAM based on resistance storage has better performance than eFlash in non-volatility, random access and so on.
 

eMRAM utilizes the change of resistance caused by magnetism to represent 0 or 1of binary, and realizes read operations by measuring the resistance of a memory cell. This chip has both high read speed of SRAM and high integration of DRAM. In addition, because of its special storage mode, it also has a very high number of P/E. It is the best choice of memory chips in the future. Samsung claimed that its eMRAM technology based on 28FDS process can provide lower cost and power consumption, and has an advantage in write speed. Its physical characteristics determine that there is no need to erase the period before writing data, so the write speed is 1000 times faster than eFlash. eMRAM requires a lower voltage than eFlash at work, so it consumes less power.
 

The structure of Samsung eMRAM
 

Working principle
Samsung can lower the cost of eMRAM because they can easily integrate with the existing logic chip manufacturing process. Only a few layers require to be added to the end of the process to complete the manufacturing. Through this modular design, Samsung can not only enjoy low cost advantages brought by the existing manufacturing process, but also enjoy performance improvement brought by the new technology.
 

Samsung announced that it will expand its range of high-density non-volatile memory solutions this year, including launching 1GB eMRAM test chip this year. Before that, Intel also announced that it’s ready for mass production of eMRAM chips. As memory factories gradually begin to mass-produce eMRAM chips, we will be able to use these low-consumption and high-performance memory chips soon.