Everspin showed off a wafer of 1Gbit MRAMs made on GloFo’s 28nm process at Electronica. The technology has been scaling at 18 months per generation and is set to scale further.

It went from a 90nm 64Mbit currently in production to a 40nm 256Mbit which is sampling to this 1Gbit which has just got into silicon. All three generations were made by GliFo’s fab in Singapore.

The MRAM specialist has done a deal with GloFo allowing the foundry to use embedded MRAM in its customers’ SoCs.

“Embedded flash is on available on 40nm but our deal with GloFo allows them to put embedded non-volatile memory on 28nm SoCs,” Everspin’s CEO Phil LoPresti, “so you can now release aggressive nodes and still have embedded non-volatile memory on the ICs.”

GloFo plans to have the process running on 22nm FD-SOI either late next year or early 2018.

Spin-torque switching MRAM has the advantage over flash that “embedded flash on SOI is almost impossible,” says LoPresti.

As a single transistor cell MRAM is dense compared to 6T SRAM or eflash which needs large transistors for programming.

LoPresti has adopted a practical philosophy for MRAM. “Everyone is looking for a universal memory but it’s more like the world is going for specialty memories – phase change, resistive RAM, nano – there’s not going to be one solution that fits all,” he said.

Everspin’s 1Gbit has a perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction ( pMTJ).