Freescale Brings Chip to Market Based on Magnetic Technology By DON CLARK Wall Street Journal
July 10, 2006; Page B8 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115249171304801944.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news Freescale Semiconductor Inc. is claiming victory in a decades-old race to commercialize a radical change in memory-chip technology. The Austin, Texas, company, spun off from Motorola Inc. in 2004, today plans to begin selling chips called MRAMs, which use magnetic technology to store data. MRAMs are one of several proposed candidates for a kind of universal memory, able to perform chores that now require three different kinds of chips. Large and small companies have struggled for years to perfect the technology. Some, such as Cypress Semiconductor Corp., wound up giving up on MRAMs. "If Freescale is shipping a commercial product, they deserve congratulations for a technical breakthrough," said T.J. Rodgers, Cypress's chief executive officer. For now, Freescale is targeting a narrow slice of the memory-chip market, which totals more than $50 billion a year. The company's MRAMs now lack the storage capacity and low prices needed for mass-market applications such as storing data in personal computers and cellphones, and Freescale isn't ready to say they ever will. "It is too early in the evolution of the technology to even claim that such a feat is feasible," said Sumit Sadana, Freescale's senior vice president of strategy and business development. Mainstream memory chips have pluses and minuses. The most widely used variety -- dynamic random-access memories, or DRAMs -- offers high capacities and low cost, but it doesn't retain information when electrical current is switched off. That shortcoming is shared by SRAMs, or static random-access memories, which are favored when speed is the most important factor. Flash memory, used in cellphones and digital cameras, keeps data without electrical current but is relatively slow and can eventually wear out. MRAMs, or magnetoresistive random-access memories, are relatively fast and retain data without electric current. Freescale also says they can store data indefinitely. The chips are made by combining conventional silicon with materials that are permanently magnetized. While other chips store data as electrical charges, MRAMs store data by manipulating changes in magnetic states and the resistance to the flow of current through the chip. Freescale's first MRAMs, which carry a suggested price of $25 each, store just four megabits of data. By contrast, DRAMs that store 512 megabits of data now cost only about $5. But MRAMs can read and write data in cycles of about 35 billionths of a second. That is much faster than DRAMs and competitive with some SRAMs, said Bob Merritt, an analyst at Semico Research Corp., a Phoenix market-research firm. Mr. Sadana said the combination of features would be attractive in applications where speed and permanent data storage are needed, including components of server systems, networking and data-storage devices, home-security systems and computer printers. Some such products now combine a battery and an SRAM; with MRAMs, a battery wouldn't be needed, he said. The company plans to keep developing the technology for such "embedded" applications, rather than targeting the mainstream memory market itself. However, Mr. Sadana said it may license the technology to other companies to do so. Mr. Rodgers of Cypress remains skeptical about how broadly MRAMs will be used. His company, which collaborated in the field with NVE Corp., spent $56 million and three years on the technology before abandoning the effort in 2005, he said. Cypress, of San Jose, Calif., developed sample chips that worked but had a puzzling, intermittent defect that would have taken more money to fix, Mr. Rodgers said. At the same time, he said, his company became convinced that MRAMs would never be inexpensive enough to replace SRAMs and that the smaller markets MRAMs might address wouldn't justify the additional investment. ================================================= George Antunes Voice (713) 743-3923 Associate Professor Fax (713) 743-3927 Political Science Internet: antunes at uh dot edu University of Houston Houston, TX 77204-3011 Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
