March 2016

Crossbar announced the company opened a new office in Shanghai, China. The company hopes the local presence in China will enable them to find new partners and customers.

Crossbar has extensive China-based VC backing and roots (the company's technology was first developed by China-native Prof. Wei D. Lu's team, who is now the chief scientist at Crossbar). Crossbar recently signed a strategic partnership with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) - China's largest semiconductor foundry.

Strategic Elements reports that the alternative fabrication method it started investigating a few weeks ago has succeeded in creating a layer of nanocube ink over five times thinner than achieved previously with increased performance.

The surface roughness and uniformity of the nanocube layer was also significantly enhanced. The new method was developed and optimized at the University of New South Wales.

In October 2015 SanDisk announced a partnership with HP to co-develop RRAM technologies, enhance SanDisk's RRAM tech with HP's memristor technologies. Eventually, SanDisk will provide its RRAM memory tech to HP that will embed it in its products.

According to SanDisk's enterprise storage manager and senior VP, John Scaramuzzo, SanDisk expects the first RRAM chips to appear in enterprise storage products in 2018. The company expects RRAM to "revolutionize" storage storage architectures once it gets productized.

Crossbar announced a strategic partnership with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) - China's largest semiconductor foundry. The two companies agreed to co-develop and produce RRAM technologies.

Crossbar says that as the company enters the licensing phase, it is honored to collaborate with SMIC - which is a major stepping stone towards its RRAM technology commercialization.

Adesto Technologies announced that it will start producing 45nm CBRAM chips at TPSCo (TowerJazz Panasonic Semiconductor Company) Japan's 300mm Hokuriku fab. Adesto says that producing at 45nm will enable them to expand their offering and develop new chips that consume even less power than today's CBRAM chips.

Today Adesto manufactures CBRAM chips using a 130nm process at Altis Semiconductor. Adesto estimates that it will take about 2 years to ramp up CBRAM technologies at TPSCo's fab.

Adesto Technologies introduced a new CBRAM (a type of RRAM memory) chip family, called the Moneta. These are ultra-low power memory solutions, designed to reduce overall system energy use in connected devices.

Moneta chips perform read and write operations at 50-100x lower power than competitive solutions. The company is now shipping samples in four densities: 32Kbit, 64Kbit, 128Kbit, and 256Kbit.