NEC breakthrough paves way for powerless standy-by modes NEC has
announced the development of a memory circuit element that, it
claims, will allow chips to consume no power when they're put in
stand-by mode. The circuit component is a non-volatile magnetic
flip-flop (MFF) - not a reference to cheap footwear but to a
transistor-based circuit of the type assembled by schoolboys to
make two lightbulbs flash alternately. In processors, the
circuit is used as the basis of a 1-bit memory cell, storing a
bit in its two possible states, within the register storage
space. Existing flip-flops require power to maintain their state
and a clock circuit to control them. NEC's MFF uses magnetism to
eliminate the need for juice. So, says NEC, use MFFs instead of
traditional memory flip-flops and non-volatile MRam cells
instead of SRam, and you have the basis for a system-on-a-chip
part that can be completely powered down yet still retain data -
something traditional SoCs can't do. Using MRam, the company
added, also gets ove