As IoT and AI technologies continue to advance, MCUs used in endpoint devices are expected to deliver higher performance than ever. The CPU clock frequencies of high performance MCUs are in the hundreds of MHz, so to achieve greater performance, read speeds of embedded non-volatile memory need to be increased to minimize the gap between them and CPU clock frequencies.
Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) offers many advantages, including high speed, low power, and non-volatility. Renesas has developed circuit technologies for an embedded MRAM test chip with fast read and write operations. Fabricated using a 22-nm process, this microcontroller unit (MCU) test chip includes a 10.8-megabit (Mbit) embedded MRAM memory cell array. It achieves a random read access frequency of over 200MHz and a write throughput of 10.4-megabytes-per-second (MBps).