Japan, US firms team up to make MRAM chips

[TOKYO] More than 20 Japanese and US chip makers will jointly develop technology to mass-produce a next-generation semiconductor using MRAM (magnetoresistive random access memory), the business daily Nikkei reported yesterday.

US chip giant Micron Technology and Tokyo Electron of Japan will lead the joint project, hoping to perfect the technology within three years and start mass production as early as 2018, the newspaper said without citing sources.

MRAM is touted as the next frontier for computing memory over the current standard, DRAM (dynamic random access memory).