There are many companies working on replacement technologies for current memories. From T-RAM Semiconductor’s Thin-Capacitivel-Coupled-Thyristor (TCCT) technology, to Innovative Silicon’s Z-RAM, and Freescale’s Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM). So far these companies have delivered a lot of papers and presentations, patent filings, a few licensing agreements, and even several consumer samples. But can these technologies really replace DRAM, Flash, and SRAM? The other day designnews.com, posted a short article titled: MRAM Shows Potential to Move Beyond Flash, SRAM. The article is mostly a summary of the advantages that MRAM offers over DRAM and Flash, including MRAM’s ability to retain data even when completely turned off and its superior write performance and endurance when compared to Flash. Freescale has a very nice technical brochure that explains the MRAM technology in detail, in case you need some bedtime reading. Currently, Freescale offers three different MRAM parts all of which run at 3.3V. Personally, I think that MRAM technology has real potential to take off once Freescale figures out how to lower the voltage and embed some of the MRAM technology into its SOC products. For example, a last level cache could benefit from this technology since shutting it off to conserve power would no longer require for all the data to be evicted from the cache first to not compromise the integrity of the system. Whether or not MRAM will be utilized this way will depend on the read and write speeds of MRAM as compared to SRAM at these lower voltages, as well as on area demands and noise tolerance. Nevertheless, it is nice to see that in the near future circuit designers might have a larger choice of technologies from which they will be able to choose when designing memories.