Everspin Technologies' xSPI STT-MRAM Chips Offer 400MB/s Throughput, Unlimited Read/Write Endurance
Offering high throughput, low power, and the promise of unlimited read/write/erase cycles and 10-year data retention, these chips impress.
Everspin Technologies has announced sampling of spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive RAM (STT-MRAM) parts designed to replace traditional SPI flash — and offering, the company claims, a sustained 400MB/s throughput and guaranteed endurance across any number of reads and writes.
"The EMxxLX family provides a breakthrough level of performance along with an ease-of-use approach," claims said Sanjeev Aggarwal, Everspin Technologies' president and chief executive, of the launch, brought to our attention by CNX Software.
"This is achieved by conforming to a broad range of SPI/QSPI/xSPI industry standards,and by bringing extremely high bandwidth, low latency, non-volatile writing capability. These features will both enhance and simplify system design for use with practically all microcontroller, microprocessor, and FPGA platforms already in the market."
To ship in 24-ball BGA and eight-pin DFN packages, Everspin's new STT-MRAM chips come in capacities of 1MB to 8MB and offer a 10-year data retention guarantee at an industrial temperature range of -40°C to 85°C (around -40°F to 185°F) plus the promise of "unlimited read, write, and erase operations for the supported life of the product." Performance, meanwhile, is rated at 400MB/s for both read and write — though this will only be achievable when connected to a JEDEC Expanded Serial Peripheral Interface (xSPI) bus.
While top performance is only available to xSPI-compatible devices, the chips are built to be an effective drop-in replacement for existing QSPI and SPI flash — offering lower power draw, the ability to be addressed as NVSRAM, FRAM, NOR flash, or toggle-MRAM, and an emulation of NOR flash's execute-in-place (XIP) functionality to allow applications to run directly from the MRAM chips without having to be transferred to traditional RAM first.
Pricing has not yet been published for the chips, with the parts sampling with selected customers ahead of general availability later this year. More information is available on the Everspin Technologies website - alongside the promise of an FPGA-based evaluation board for the parts.