Embedded.com - MEMORY - Startup unveils resistive nonvolatile memory

Description

LONDON — After seven years of R&D Unity Semiconductor Corp. has unveiled a nonvolatile memory based on a proprietary resistive RAM technology. The specification of the memory should allow it to be four times denser than NAND flash, with 5 to 10x the write speed, the company claimed.

If successfully brought to market " which Unity acknowledges may require some technology sharing and IP licensing " the so called CMOx memory could be a game-changer for the electronics industry, particularly at the high capacity end, in servers and personal computers, industry observers have said.

The company's technology, which it labels CMOx for conductive metal oxide, is based on the use of layered conductive metal oxides. With the technology, Unity claims to have devised a passive rewritable cross-point memory array that requires no transistor in a memory cell. This has obvious benefits for scalability in the lateral direction, allowing CMOx to go beyond 35-nm where flash and DRAM both start to hit problems. Indeed, the simplicity of the memory array is also allowing Unity to lay down multiple planes of memory on a chip, increasing density yet further.

Unity (Sunnyvale, Calif.) has been processing 64-kilobit circuits for two years, 64-megabit chips for one year, and is in design with a 64-gigabit product that is close ...

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