Everspin has announced that the industry's first Perpendicular Magnetic Tunnel Junction chip is now shipping. The company will demo the worlds's fastest SSD using it next week.
Today's non-volatile solutions rely either on the flash memory used in SSDs -- which is slow and easily worn out -- or backing up DRAM with batteries or supercapacitors, both of which add cost and complexity.
Everspin's new chip is 32MB (256 Mbit). The read and write latency is similar to DRAM, which is far better than flash, and the endurance is many orders of magnitude better than flash. The high endurance means that this NVRAM can be placed close to the CPU -- on the memory bus or PCIe.
Next week, at the Flash Memory Summit, Everspin will demo what it bills as the world's fastest SSD, a single PCIe card capable of 1.5 million random 4k writes per second. Most flash SSD-based arrays can't manage 1 million reads per second.
Everspin's new chip is based on a 40nm process, and the company expects it can go to 1Gbit with a 28nm process soon and, eventually, much higher capacities with smaller geometries.
This NVRAM can be integrated into processors, FPGAs, ASICs, motherboards, SSDs, and as a storage system accelerator.
The release of pMTJ-based ST-MRAM products will enable Everspin to provide solutions for the multi-billion dollar market requiring persistent memory. Storage and server OEMs have already been evaluating Everspin’s ST-MRAM products and are planning to use these higher density devices. Everspin will also offer a 1 Gigabit DDR4 ST-MRAM product that is in development now, based on a scaled down version of our 256Mb pMTJ.