Everspin Technologies
Everspin Technologies is a public semiconductor company headquartered in Chandler, Arizona, United States. It develops and manufactures discrete magnetoresistive RAM or magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) products, including Toggle MRAM and Spin-Transfer Torque MRAM (STT-MRAM) product families. It also licenses its technology for use in embedded MRAM (eMRAM) applications, magnetic sensor applications as well as performs backend foundry services for eMRAM. MRAM has the performance characteristics close to static random-access memory (SRAM) while also having the persistence of non-volatile memory, meaning that it will not lose its charge or data if power is removed from the system. This characteristic makes MRAM suitable for a large number of applications where persistence, performance, endurance and reliability are critical. History The path to MRAM began in 1984 when the GMR effect was discovered by Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg. Twelve years later, in 1996, spin-transfer torque is proposed, enabling a magnetic tunnel junction or spin valve to be modified with a spin-polarized current. At this point, Motorola began their MRAM research, which led to their first MTJ in 1998. A year later, in 1999, Motorola developed a 256Kb MRAM Test Chip that enabled work to begin on productizing MRAM technology, which was followed by a patent for Toggle being granted to Motorola in 2002. The industry's first MRAM (4Mb) product became commercially available in 2006. Much of the early MRAM work was done by Motorola, who spun off their semiconductor business in 2004, creating Freescale Semiconductor in 2008, which eventually spun out the MRAM business as Everspin Technologies. In 2008, Everspin announced BGA packages for their MRAM product family that would support densities from 256Kb to 4Mb. The following year, in 2009, Everspin released their first generation SPI MRAM product family and began shipping the first embedded MRAM samples in conjunction with GlobalFoundries. By 2010, Everspin had begun ramping production and sold its first million MRAMs. That same year qualification had completed on the industry's first embedded MRAM and 16Mb densities had been released. With production ramping, Everspin shipped its four millionth stand-alone MRAM and its two millionth embedded MRAM by 2011. The 64Mb ST-MRAM, which was produced on a 90 nm process occurred in 2012. In 2014 Everspin partnered with GlobalFoundries for production of in-plane and perpendicular MTJ ST-MRAM on 300mm wafers, utilizing 40 nm and 28 nm node processes. By 2016, Everspin had announced it was shipping samples of the industry's first 256Mb ST-MRAM to customers, GlobalFoundries announced 22 nm embedded MRAM in conjunction with Everspin, and Everspin went public in an IPO later in the year on October 7. In 2017, Everspin expanded support for MRAM to FPGAs by bringing DDR3 and DDR4 compatibility to its ST-MRAM products, making it compatible with Xilinx's UltraScale FPGA memory controller. On September 1, 2017, Kevin Conley was named Everspin CEO and President. Conley was the former CTO of SanDisk and brings enterprise storage expertise to the company. In 2018, Everspin ramped production volumes of its 256Mb STT-MRAM and in December shipped its first customer