Freescale Semiconductor has made available a new memory technology which combines the speed of SRAM and the non-volatility of Flash.

The new technology is called Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) and it is a fast, non-volatile memory with unlimited endurance – a combination of characteristics not available in any other individual semiconductor memory product.

MRAM uses magnetic materials combined with conventional silicon circuitry to deliver the speed of SRAM with the non-volatility of Flash in a single, high endurance device. Freescale’s successful commercialization of this technology could hasten new classes of electronic products offering dramatic advances in size, cost, power consumption and system performance.

“With the commercialization of MRAM, Freescale is the first-to-market with a technology of tremendous possibilities and profound implications,” said Bob Merritt, Semico Research. “Competition to become the first company to market MRAM technology was fierce. This is a significant achievement that certainly confirms the dedication of Freescale’s engineering team.”

The new product has 35 nanosecond read and write cycle times, and it’s an asynchronous memory organized as 256K words by 16 bits operating within commercial temperature range.

MRAM will is appropriate for a variety of commercial applications such as networking, security, data storage, gaming and printers. The part is engineered to be a reliable, economical, single-component replacement for battery-backed SRAM units. The device also could be used in cache buffers, configuration storage memories and other applications that require the speed, endurance and non-volatility of MRAM.