NVE wins DARPA contract for magneto-thermal MRAM

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. -- NVE Corp. said Monday (August 4, 2003) that it has been awarded a two-year contract worth $750,000 to develop a magneto-thermal refinement to conventional magnetic random access memory (MRAM) technology. The contract was awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and is being administered by the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, NVE said. The contract represents a continuation of government funding to NVE to advance and commercialize MRAM, and NVE includes Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Motorola Inc. among its licensees (see May 22 story). NVE has an agreement for Motorola to pay NVE royalties, and a contract for Cypress to manufacture MRAMs for NVE, the company said. MRAM uses electrons' spin rather than their charge to store data, and has the potential of combining the speed of semiconductor memory with the non-volatility of magnetic disk drives. Companies such as Motorola, Infineon and IBM are preparing to enter the market with conventional MRAM devices. NVE is now proposing that a magneto-thermal MRAM could use a combination of magnetic fields and ultra-fast heating from electrical current pulses to shrink the memory cell size still further and reduce the energy required to write data. The project has been specified to be compatible with a chip capacity of one gigabit at 100-nanometer lithography, which would allow MRAM to be fabricated at bit densities comparable to available DRAMs. "For MRAM to supplant DRAM in mainstream applications, both cell size and write current need to be reduced," said Daniel Baker, president and chief executive officer of NVE, in a statement "Magneto-thermal MRAM addresses both issues, strengthening the promise of MRAM as the ideal memory. This contract will help bolster our intellectual property portfolio in this important area."