Hope to have products out with MRAM in 2005 IBM and Infineon Technologies will outline their advances in developing MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM) technology in a paper presented Tuesday at the VLSI Symposia in Kyoto, Japan.MRAM is a nonvolatile type of memory, which means it can store information for extended periods of time without a power supply, said Bill Gallagher, manager of magnetoelectronics at IBM Research. Cell phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) use a type of nonvolatile memory called flash memory that stores data without having to save it to a hard drive.Infineon and IBM’s MRAM technology takes the idea of nonvolatile memory a step further, by integrating MRAM into a memory cell with an area of 1.4 square microns developed with 0.18-micron process technologies. This 128Kb MRAM chip is about 20 million times smaller than a pencil eraser, and is the smallest MRAM chip to date, Gallagher said. MRAM technology had been used in military and aerospace environments, but has not been a mainstream technology, Gallagher said. DRAM (dynamic RAM) technology currently dominates the market for PCs and notebooks, but MRAM technology could allow portable devices such as notebooks or PDAs to use less power, he said.“It’s a good combination of density, speed, and nonvolatility,” Gallagher said. DRAM technology is cheap and can store a lot of data, but requires a power charge and is slow. Another type of memory, SRAM (static RAM), is a high-speed memory technology, but it is more expensive than DRAM.IBM and Infineon’s technology could eliminate the boot process in normal PCs, when the operating system is loaded from the hard drive, Gallagher said. MRAM could store the entire operating system in memory, so it could be launched immediately when power is activated, he said. The two companies are expected to produce samples of the technology by early 2004, and hope to have products out with MRAM in 2005, they said.The VLSI Symposia is held annually to present advances in processor design and implementation. Companies such as Intel, Texas Instruments, Hitachi, Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices, and Sony, among others, are expected to make presentations on a variety of topics. The Symposia runs through Saturday.