Samsung plans to expand M-RAM chips production in Korea

Samsung Electronics is expanding the application field of magnetoresistive memory (M-RAM). M-RAM is a non-volatile memory that writes and reads data according to the change in resistance value by utilizing the electronic rotation generated by applying current to the magnetic material.

Since 2019, Samsung Electronics has applied a built-in M-RAM based on the 28-nano fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) process to microcontroller units (MCU) and system-on-chip (SoC) for small electronic products.

At the Semicon Korea conference, Han Shin-hee, a researcher at Samsung Electronics’ Foundry Division, said, “The M-RAM solution has improved the magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) function so that it can be applied to various fields. In the future, M-RAM will be used as automotive, wearable, graphic memory, “We plan to expand the scope of use to Level Cache (LLC), Internet of Things (IoT) systems, and edge artificial intelligence (AI).”

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M-RAM resistance varies depending on whether the magnetizations of the two ferromagnetic layers (CoFeB) constituting the MTJ are parallel or antiparallel. MTJ patterning plays an important role in improving the performance and reliability of MRAM.

Samsung announced that it will develop technology to reduce the size of M-RAM die by 40% compared to S-RAM. The target read/write speed is less than 20 nanoseconds (ns). In the case of M-RAM, which Samsung Electronics announced last year at the International Electronic Devices Conference (IEDM) held in December last year, the chip size is 0.08mm2/Mbit.

Compared to SRAM (0.15mm2/Mbit) based on the same process, the chip area has been reduced by half. The read/write speed achieved 30~50ns. It provides about 1000 times faster write speed than embedded flash.