Freescale, the Austin, Texas-based spin off of Motorola’s semiconductor business, announced their MR2A16A chip, which the company says is the first commercial MRAM, or Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory, device.

MRAM is faster than most other types of computer memory; Freescale’s chip promises to read or write data in 35 nanoseconds. MRAM is also nonvolatile. In MRAM, a tiny magnetic field is created inside a memory cell on a chip. The computer then measures the electrical resistance exhibited by the magnetic field at any given moment to determine whether the cell should be read as a “1″ or a “0,” the binary building blocks of data.

Freescale’s MR2A16A chips, however, aren’t inexpensive. The 4-megabit part now shipping costs $25 at wholesale and is available in low volumes only.