RRAM News - Page 1

Panasonic announced a new partnership with Taiwan-based United Microelectronics Corp (UMC) to co-develop and produce RRAM devices. The two companies aim to use a 40nm process to produce RRAM chips that consume one-seventh the power of today's NAND flash memory.

Panasonic will be in charge of designing the chips, and the two companies will co-develop the microfabrication technologies. Actual production will be done at UMC. The two companies plan to start shipping samples in 2018 and mass produce RRAM chips by 2019. The first RRAM devices will be embedded in microcontrollers.

In March 2016 Crossbar announced its strategic partnership with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) to co-develop and produce RRAM technologies. Crossbar now says it started to sample embedded RRAM chips from SMIC.

SMIC, China's largest semiconductor foundry, is using a 40nm process, and Crossbar says that it plans for a 28nm process - and even 10nm or lower down the road. The chip design uses non-conductive amorphous silicon (a-SI) technology. Crossbar's chips can either use a 1T1R architecture (1 transistor per RRAM, which offers the lowest latency and so useful for embedded memory and caching) or 1TnR (which uses up to 2,000 cells per transistor using a crossbar scheme - which makes for higher density chips useful for storage).

Researchers from the Guizhou Institute of Technology in China produced RRAM devices using finely ground used egg shells. These devices were not very durable - they only lasted about 100 write cycles...

To create the devices, the researchers ground the egg shells until they got a 'nanoscale' powder. They then dried it and dissolved it in a solution. The solution was than used to coat a substrate to form the electrolyte part of the RRAM device.

A team of international researchers, from China (Nanyang Technological University), Singapore (NTU) and Germany (RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Juelich) developed a technique to turn RRAM chips into logic processors.

The researchers say that these kind of processors eliminate the need to transfer data between memory storage and the computational unit (as it is now the same unit) - and so these processors could be at least two times faster than current processors. The new processors will also be smaller than current designs.

2016 is soon over - and it was an eventful year for the RRAM industry. We have seen new RRAM devices demonstrated by several companies, encouraging words from industry leaders and Fujitsu's first RRAM chip.

Here are the top 10 stories posted on RRAM-Info in 2016, ranked by popularity (i.e. how many people read the story):

1. Strategic Elements developed transparent RRAM devices, endures 100,000 test cycles (Jun 3)
2. Western Digital: RRAM is the technology of choice for Storage Class Memory (Aug 12)
3. Fujitsu launches its first RRAM chip, the 4Mb MB85AS4MT (Oct 27)
4. Samsung will be ready soon with RRAM chips (Apr 21)
5. Panasonic demonstrate battery-less NFC electronic shelf labels with its ReRAM MCUs (May 14)
6. Researchers developed a high-performance 3D vertical crossbar array (Jul 14)
7. SanDisk expects RRAM to enter the enterprise storage market in 2018 (Mar 16)
8. Adesto introduces new ultra low-power CBRAM chips (Mar 7)
9. Intermolecular offers its ReRAM technology for licensing (May 6)
10. Yole Developpement sees $4.6 billion in sales of MRAM, RRAM and PCM memories generating $4.6 billion in 2021 (Jul 28)

Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) developed a security RRAM device that can be dissolved in water in less than 10 seconds. The idea, it seems, is that this kind of device can be disposed of quickly and safely.

The RRAM device was produced on a solid sodium glycerine (SSG) substrate, which is water soluble. The RRAM chip itself was deposited using an inkjet-printer.

Researchers from Leti presented a new paper that clarified for the first time the correlation between endurance, window margin and retention of RRAM. The researchers advice ways module these three key properties, in different RRAM types.

Each RRAM type and base material has a different "sweet spot" that offers the best performance in all three categories. Using modelling the researchers were able to address various non-volatile memory applications, targeting high speed, high endurance or high stability.