Powerless, yet memorable
MIT Technology Review sheds light on Freescale Semiconductor's new development in non-volatile memory.
Quoting the article...
Using the magnetic properties of a material gives a "unique combination of characteristics that you can't get in any other semiconductor material," says Saied Tehrani, director of MRAM at Freescale. MRAM chips, he says, hold data without a power supply and can be written to and read from an unlimited number of times. Reading and writing data from MRAM is also fast, taking a matter of nanoseconds.
What will be interesting is to see if they can increase the density beyond current levels (4 Mbits, vs. flash memory capabilities in the Gbits range). If so, low-power, instant-on devices may yet be in our future.
UPDATE: There's also, this July 20th article in EE Times that provides some perspective on applications and possible market evolution for this technology.