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IBM and Infineon Technologies AG said Tuesday that they have reached a key milestone on the way to commercializing magnetic RAM as early as 2005.

At the VLSI Symposia taking plane in Japan this week, IBM and Infirnon said they will announce that the two companies have jointly fabricated a 128-Kbit Magnetic RAM (MRAM) core on a 0.18-micron process, the most aggressive use of lithography to date to fabricate an MRAM.

Both companies are eyeing MRAM as a possible replacement for DRAM, which requires a constant source of electricity to refresh the memory cells. Without it, the "volatile" memory cells lose their charge, and their contents. "Nonvolatile" memories such as flash memory retain their contents in the absence of electricity, but they only have a limited number of read and rewrite cycles.

IBM and Infineon to incorporated the technology to craft the smallest MRAM memory cell size of 1.4 square microns.

"Nonvolatile memory technologies like MRAM will play a major role in technology lifestyle solutions and we want to be the number one semiconductor company in this area by having a product demonstrator jointly developed with IBM available early 2004," said Wilhelm Beinvogl, chief technical officer of Infineon's Memory Product Division, in a statement. "Together with Altis Semiconductor, a joint venture of IBM and Infineon, we will pave the way for production readiness of MRAM as early as 2005."

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Source: ExtremeTech