Re:IEDM 2022: Did We Just Witness the Death of SRAM?
by zozbot234 on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @07:11PM
(#33992927)
Magnetic tape doesn't have unlimited lifespan. You can store it almost indefinitely, but reading and writing tape will cause quite a bit of wear and tear on the media. But yes, it would be great if MRAM turned out to have such a favorable profile.
Re:IEDM 2022: Did We Just Witness the Death of SRAM?
by bigger_cheese on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @08:26PM
(#33993742)
I remember hearing about MRAM while I was studying Materials Engineering at uni, also mentioned was Phase change memory, which worked off of a phase change between Crystalline and amorphous states in a glass material did anything ever progress with this technology? It sounded super interesting at the time.
Re:IEDM 2022: Did We Just Witness the Death of SRAM?
by codebje on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @09:44PM
(#33994449)
I'm very far from an expert in this field, sorry. PCM (and other resistive memories) are definitely still a thing, though - they've been used for in-memory computation, doing vector-matrix multiplications directly in the memory cells and thus saving massive amounts of die area over using separate CMOS logic, so they're probably going to replace on-die SRAM for some applications.
But more on point, this article's context is static ram on-die for a microcontroller or similar. One possible replacement for SRAM is magneto-resistive RAM (MRAM) - it's not quite as fast as SRAM but close enough for many applications, it's higher density than SRAM, so it'll take up less die space, and it's non-volatile so µCs can ditch the NOR flash often used for code storage.
One great thing about MRAM is that it has no write wearing: it has an effectively unlimited lifespan, without all the downsides of magnetic tape. I look forward to seeing it (or similar technologies) in microcontrollers in the future.