Researchers from Micron Technology Inc. and Sony Corp. will present further details of the non-volatile 16-Gbit ReRAM they are developing together at the upcoming International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) to be held Dec. 15 to 17, 2014 in San Francisco.
The collaboration is long-standing and was first mentioned by Sony in a press announcement in November 2011 when it gave itself three or four years to get the technology to market.
A 2015 target date for introduction appears to be just about achievable as the 16-Gbit device being presented at IEDM shows signs of being reasonably well characterized.
However, further insight into that will have to await publication of the paper as the abstract in the advanced program is brief. It gives little more information that was present in paper 19.7 presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) last February.
So among the things known about the device is that it is fabricated in a 27nm manufacturing process and is based on copper, making it similar to the CBRAM technology (conductive bridging RAM) of Adesto Technologies Inc. The cell area is 6F2. One development since the ISSCC presentation is that the achievable write and read data rates have been reduced to 133Mbytes per second for writing and to 666Mbytes per second for reading. The ISSCC presentation referenced 200MB/s and 1GB/s rates, respectively.
At the 2013 Flash Memory Summit a Sony representative reportedly gave a presentation saying the company hoped to start producing 16Gbit ReRAM chips by 2015 for the storage-class memory market.
In a similar vein to the Micron-Sony development – but using silver as the mobile ion to form filaments – startup Crossbar will present in the same session at IEDM on 4Mbit 3D-stackable ReRAM arrays. The paper focuses on the selector performance.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Adesto Ships 1 Million CBRAM Memories
Nanotube Memory Shows Universal Potential
Crossbar Funding Moves ReRAM Closer to Market
ST Turns to ReRAM for 28nm Embedded Memory
Embedded ReRAM Gets Into Distribution
