TI, University of Florida student team up for FRAM research

I just learned about a rather interesting university research story that improved upon the FRAM technology used in the MSP430 Wolverine platform from Texas Instruments (TI). It's nice to get a glimpse as to what goes into the research on these technologies – also this is a great example of TI's commitment to developing its future engineers.

It seems that former University of Florida (UF) student – and now full-time Texas Instruments (TI) employee – Tony Acosta had stumbled upon a link between his graduate school research and discoveries he had made as a TI intern. He just needed the mentorship support to research his findings.

The discovery began when Tony, as a UF graduate student, was researching strained silicon – a method used in silicon to boost the performance of transistors, which are (of course) the basic building blocks of integrated circuits. Tony took this knowledge with him to his first TI internship in the summer of 2008, where he worked with his TI mentor, senior member of technical staff Dr. John Rodriguez, on Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FRAM) development. A more efficient alternative to Flash memory, FRAM is used in TI's MSP430 Wolverine microcontroller platform where it helps cut energy consumption by half.

Now a full-time TI product engineer, Tony still works with FRAM technology. His project findings from the research were so substantial that he even submitted a patent application. Click Here to read more of Tony's tale on the AroundTI blog.