Announcements earlier this week that Samsung had acquired Grandis certainly brought additional attention to Grandis’ spin transfer torque MRAM technology, marketed as "STT-RAM" by Grandis. While early reports indicated that Grandis would be merged into Samsung’s R&D operation, details of the agreement are still unclear since a later press release quoted a Samsung spokesperson that declined to comment on the cost of the acquisition or the size of the stake. However the ability of Grandis’ work in a variation of spin transfer torque MRAM to attract a large suitor is without question.
Samsung has maintained research in several of the new and emerging memory technologies. Their most publicized efforts were with the introduction of PCM into some cell phone models earlier this year, although that activity has been notable lately more for the silence and lack of any further public announcements.
While the Samsung/Grandis announcement was surprising in the sense that Grandis had established an earlier partnership with Hynix, Samsung was already known to be involved in research efforts in MRAM. Samsung reported progress on the company’s own STT-MRAM research at the most recent IEDM conference in December 2010. Using a ferromagnetic electrode and a different Magnetic Tunnel Junction structure, Samsung believed their research would accelerate the development of sub-30nm scaling and would continue to scale to sub-20nm levels with STT-MRAM.
We believe that Grandis’ announcement is in line with our previous forecasts. In earlier blogs, we spoke of the increasing maturity of new and emerging memory technologies, and the resulting rise in significance of the manufacturing strategy. While earlier efforts to raise funding was based on spread sheet comparisons of the potential performance advantages, competition is shifting toward a stronger emphasis on the manufacturing infrastructure. Technologies such as Ramtron’s FeRAM and Everspin’s MRAM have been in production and have surpassed the challenges of transitioning from R/D into volume production. The recent commitment of RUSNANO to provide manufacturing support Crocus’ TAS-MRAM, Intel’s transfer of their PCM program to Micron, as well as the partnership between Adesto and Altis are additional indications of this shift.
We believe that this recent Samsung/Grandis announcement falls into that same category of accelerating the transition to a new phase of commercializing new and emerging memory technologies.
www.convergentsemiconductors.com - Global Analysis of Memory Strategies and Issues
