Magnetic RAM In the Works

German-based Infineon has reported the successful development of a new chip technology that will boost current RAM speeds as much as five times. The new RAM, magnetic random access memory, is currently being developed in conjunction with researchers at IBM. According to Bijan Davari, IBM Fellow and Vice President of Technology and Emerging Products, "MRAM has the potential to replace today’s memory technologies in electronic products of the future."

Along with greater speeds, the new MRAM will also decrease power consumption by as much as 50% according to research done at Big Blue.

According to Newsbytes and the press release over at Infineon, the new power is derived from a slight change in conventional methods, to create interlocked pipeline CMOS, which could in theory increase memory speeds to between 3.3 and 4.5GHz with the use of traditional silicon.

Research done at IBM has decentralized the clock in the new chip technology, so that the processor can run "localized" clocks to run smaller sections of circuits.

In addition to the delocalization of the clock to increase speed, Infineon hopes that by working with IBM it will be able to turn MRAM into "bubble memory" that stores computer data even after a power down, enabling the computer to boot instantly on startup, drawing from the stored memory space.

The new memory isn't expected to hit retail stores until 2004 unfortunately, but according to Bijan Davari, IBM Fellow and Vice President of Technology and Emerging Products tells reporters, "today’s announcement represents a major step forward for MRAM, quickly moving the technology out of the pure research stage into product development." For more information visit Infineon.com.