MRAM pioneer, Everspin Technologies, has just announced its latest innovation, the EMxxLX family of industrial-grade xSPI STT-MRAM chips with capacities up to 64 Mb. In this article, we take a closer look at this promising new offering, focusing on differentiating factors compared to existing flash-based devices and previous MRAM implementations.

In an effort to better understand the significance of this recent development from a design perspective, we present 4 use case scenarios to illustrate how we believe the EMxxLX xSPI family can compete with current flash-based solutions and how it really changes the game for us embedded designers.

Overview

Before we get to the actual use cases, let’s first review some of the key features and characteristics of the EMxxLX product family, along with some of the anticipated impacts and benefits for the embedded industry.

Features and characteristics

• Densities of 8 Mb, 16 Mb, 32 Mb and 64Mb.
• xSPI bus with a maximum throughput of 400 MB/s using the octal DTR configuration.
• Unlimited write endurance.
• 10-year data retention across the temperature range.
• NOR flash compatibility mode.
• No external ECC required.