EETimes schrijft dat Motorola een doorbraak heeft bereikt in de ontwikkeling van magnetoresistive random-access memories. Onlangs werd een 512-bit MRAM geheugen element gedemonstreerd. Deze MRAMs hebben een kleinere cel grootte dan normale DRAMs, maar zijn qua prestaties vergelijkbaar met SRAM chips. Motorola denkt dat de technologie in 2005 geschikt is voor commerciële toepassingen:
Saied Tehrani, the MRAM program manager at Motorola Labs, based here, said he expects embedded MRAM arrays to be in the sampling stage by 2004, and fully qualified in products by the following year.MRAMs are non-volatile memories with fast access times and a small cell size. With no detectable wear-out mechanism and no need for charge pumps to erase or write the bits, MRAM is being touted as a replacement for flash and for DRAM. Tehrani called it "the universal memory."
The Motorola demonstrator array exhibits read and program access times of just 24 nanoseconds, putting MRAMs in roughly the same speed bin as slow static RAMs and making them much faster than DRAMs. The write times range, Tehrani said.