The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has notified NVE Corporation that it will issue today a patent relating to NVE’s magnetothermal Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM).

NVE is known for commercialization of spintronics, a nanotechnology that many experts believe represents the next generation of microelectronics. MRAM is an integrated-circuit memory, fabricated with nanotechnology, that uses electron spin to store data. MRAM may have the potential to combine many of the best attributes of different types of semiconductor memories.

Magnetothermal MRAM uses a combination of ultra-fast magnetic fields and heat pulses, both from electrical current, to reduce the energy required to write data and allow reduction of the memory cell size while maintaining thermal stability.

The patent, number 7,177,178 and titled “Magnetic Memory Layers Thermal Pulse Transitions,” is in addition to patent number 7,023,723, which is similarly titled and was granted in April 2006. The invention of the new patent relates to dual-film MRAM cells.