Everspin, the only company shipping production quantities of magnetic RAM chips, recently announced it had tripled its orders in 2011.
Magnetic RAM chips work like permanent flash memory chips but with the speed of dynamic RAM. The MRAM use the spin or directional facing of a magnet to store data digitally.
Based in Chandler, Arizona and a spin-off of Freescale Semiconductor, Everspin serves more than 300 active users with 100-plus MRAM products in three major markets, and secured 250 design wins for its products in 2011.
Serving the industrial, energy, and automotive and transportation markets, Everspin’s growth was largely spurred by the enterprise storage, server and networking segment. Using MRAM chips in enterprise storage reduces system down time and simplifies system design more cost-effectively by eliminating the need for external components such as capacitors, super capacitors, batteries and resistors.
Dell and the LSI Corporation use the MRAM chips for critical data storage in RAID systems, servers and routers which demand reliable and enduring fast non-volatile memories to reliably preserve metadata in the event of power outages. Dell uses MRAM as a journal memory in its RAID storage systems, while LSI uses MRAM chips for third party RAID cards and RAID-on-Motherboard solutions.
The company shipped more than 2 million units in 2011.
“MRAM has gained acceptance as a superior alternative to non-volatile SRAM for RAID conjtrollers, allowing Everspin to capitalize on its unique position as a high-volume MRAM supplier,” Jim Handy, an analysis with Objective Analysis, said in a statement.
Further growth is on the horizon, stated Phill LoPresti, CEO of Everspin.
“Going forward, we see our next generation of Spin-Torque MRAM products providing solutions for non-volatile buffers and caching applications as well as delivering a new nanosecond-class gigabyte-per-second non-volatile storage tier,” LoPresti said.