What is STT RAM Memory and What is it for

Are you up for looking what is SST RAM memory and what is it importance for today’s computer users? You are on the right spot to know the answer of this question.

STT RAM is a new memory concept that you should know about, as more will be said about it soon. This new memory will bring interesting improvements to the current computing landscape, especially regarding the cost and capacity of current SSDs and RAM.

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History of SST-RAM Memory

Hynix Semiconductor and Grandis were the first to commercially explore STT-RAM memory in 2008. A year later, Hitachi and Tohoku University would demonstrate the operation of 32-Mbit STT-RAM memory.

In August 2011, Grandis had again been bought by Samsung Electronics due to the great interest in this memory.

And that same year Qualcomm would also present a 1Mbit embedded memory, but this time STT-MRAM type, that is, magnetic. This memory was manufactured by TSMC in 45nm LP.

In May of the same year, Russian Nanotechnology Corp also announced that it would invest a large amount of money in Crocus Nano Electronics to build an MRAM factory in Moscow.

In 2012 Eversion Technologies would release the first DDR3 with 64 Mb capacities STT-MRAM for commercial use.

A few years later, this same company would come up with 1 GB of SST-MRAM on a chip. Intel would also be interested in that memory this year for an L4 memory. And the interest has not stopped growing since then.

What is SST RAM

STT (Spin-Transfer Torque) is an effect related to the magnetic orientation of a layer in a magnetic tunnel or spin valve junction that can be modified by using a spin-polarized current.

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In this way information can be stored and memories such as STT-RAM can be created. This achieves a more efficient, fast memory with very interesting qualities for multiple applications.

Where SST RAM Memory can be used

Well, one of the fields in which they can first be applied is the modern SSD. These storage media are already fast, but not fast enough for some business tasks.

And it is that they could have buffers or caches with this type of memory that are faster than conventional RAM, further increasing the performance in the accesses of the processing units.

But best of all, these spintronic-based chips are characterized by their great performance and by having characteristics similar to non-volatile memories.

STT-MRAM technology is showing great potential for some specific applications and will be of increasing interest for the future of computing, especially when it will be combined with other technologies.

Such as In-memory and Near-memory, to maximize the speed of accesses (reads and writes) by the increasingly faster processing units and more burdened by current memories.

In addition, these cells not only save space on the silicon surface, being able to increase density or capacity per unit area.

But combined with technologies such as 3D packaging, they could also bring extremely large memories with very fast speeds.

This would break the fact that a large capacity memory cannot be fast due to its high cost when SST-RAM matures.

When will it be Marketed?

As I have mentioned before, it is already being marketed for some specific uses, especially in the HPC sector, which is the most demanding with some essential components.

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However, they will not take long to expand in the applications of the particular sector. Can you imagine what could be done with the new flourishing technologies?

Processor caches of much larger sizes, or RAM memories that are also larger and faster and more efficient than the current ones, as well as much faster SSDs in access to continue accelerating computing.

In this way, the processing units would no longer penalize so much when trying to access higher levels of the memory hierarchy.