Tower, Crocus embed MRAM in 130-nm CMOS

LONDON – Tower Semiconductor Ltd., a foundry which trades as TowerJazz, has announced that it has integrated a thermally assisted switching (TAS) magnetic random access memory (MRAM) into its 130-nm CMOS manufacturing process.

The MRAM device comes from fabless memory company Crocus Technology SA (Grenoble, France). As a result of the collaboration, a low temperature back-end process technology was developed that enables TAS MRAM memory arrays to be manufactured in Tower's 130-nm copper back-end process flow, Tower (Migdal Haemek, Israel) said.
 
The newly developed technology adds only four masks to conventional CMOS manufacturing flows and is suitable for both stand-alone and embedded memory applications, Tower said. The integration sets the stage for chips with embedded non-volatile MRMA for use in microcontroller, automotive and communications applications.

"We are highly confident that Crocus' TAS MRAM will reach mass production in a very short period of time," said Zmira Lavie, vice president of process engineering R&D at Tower, in a statement.

"The close cooperation between the engineering teams was fundamental to achieve working MRAM devices within a short period. The combined teams of Crocus and TowerJazz are moving rapidly to release a manufacturable and high-yielding MRAM technology that will serve both embedded and standalone MRAM applications," said Bertrand Cambou, executive chairman of Crocus Technology, in the same statement.

Crocus plans to sample in the "very near future" and start mass production in the second half of 2011.

Related links and articles:

www.towersemi.com

www.crocustechnology.com

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