MRam alliance unveiled

Toshiba and NEC announce joint initiative

Toshiba and NEC have announced they are working together on the next generation of memory, known as Magnetic RAM (MRam), which is expected to consume less power than current SDRam technology.

It has been reported that the two companies have joined forces, not only to produce a memory technology that will increase the battery life of notebooks, personal digital assistants and mobile phones, but also to help them compete with overseas rivals, a representative from NEC said.

MRam is expected to be a huge market and companies are already racing to join in, with Motorola in the prototype stage and IBM working with memory maker Infineon Technologies, the representative said. Intel, Hewlett-Packard and others are also working on MRam offerings.

The representative added that Toshiba and NEC aim to have MRam chips developed by March 2005 but have no plans to co-operate on marketing. Other MRam launches are expected well before this, with Motorola planning to release a 4MB MRam chip for phones as soon as 2003. No financial terms for the Toshiba/NEC alliance have been released but reports have estimated the joint investment to be £53m over the next three years.

MRam is up to 30 times faster than DRam and will allow users to write, erase and rewrite data to the chip without any data loss, which is not possible with current Flash memory.