Competing technologies - Page 6

Ovonyx, Inc. and Samsung Electronics today announced that they have entered into a long-term license agreement under Ovonyx' intellectual property relating to Ovonic Universal Memory (OUM) thin-film semiconductor memory technology.
Ovonyx memory technology uses a reversible phase-change memory process that has been previously commercialized worldwide in rewritable CD and DVD optical memory disks. The Ovonyx array-addressed semiconductor memory technology can be used in applications such as Flash and DRAM memory replacements, as well as in embedded applications in many product areas such as microcontrollers and reconfigurable MOS logic.
"The IT industry embraces change and enhancements which are enabled by advanced semiconductor technologies," said Byung-Il Ryu, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics' Semiconductor R&D Center. "The agreement we announce today will open doors to further development and research on phase-change technology (or OUM nonvolatile memory technology), a prominent solution for next generation memory designs and applications."
"Samsung is the market leader in DRAM and Flash memory production and has made rapid progress towards productizing phase-change memory technology," said Tyler Lowrey, President & CEO of Ovonyx. "Ovonyx looks forward to working with Samsung to commercialize OUM nonvolatile memory products."

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A non-volatile memory technology which is denser, faster and more cost-effective than conventional flash memory technology is closer to production, due to the continued efforts of Freescale Semiconductor to optimize the properties of silicon nanocrystals. Freescale has manufactured the world's first 24-megabit (Mbit) memory array based on silicon nanocrystals, a major step toward replacing conventional floating gate-based flash memories.
The 24-Mbit memory array technology was manufactured at Freescale's Austin Technology & Manufacturing Center using 90-nanometer (nm) CMOS bulk technology. The production of a working 24-Mbit memory device requires that silicon nanocrystals be deposited with excellent uniformity and integration approaches that keep the nanocrystal properties intact during subsequent processing. In successfully achieving this, Freescale has overcome major challenges to introducing this technology into production.
Silicon nanocrystal memories are part of an advanced class of memory technologies called thin-film storage. They are more scaleable than conventional floating gate-based flash technology, as their tunnel oxide thickness can be reduced without impacting data retention. The charge is stored on isolated nanocrystals and is lost only from those few nanocrystals that align with defects in the tunnel oxide - while the same defects would result in significant charge loss from a conventional floating gate. A thinner tunnel oxide permits lower-voltage operation, substantially reducing the memory module area needed to generate the bit-cell programming voltages, and allowing for significant wafer processing simplifications and manufacturing cost reductions. The combination of higher bit density and reduced cost translates to lower cost per bit to embed silicon nanocrystal memories. Freescale expects significant reductions in cost per bit of silicon nanocrystal thin-film storage memories.

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 For future technologies Samsung is also working on new technologies such as phase-change random access memory (RAM), magnetic RAM, ferroelectric-RAM.

The market for a memory integrated circuit that combines the speed of SRAM, the density of DRAM and the non-volatility of flash, could be $76.3 billion by 2019, according to market research company iSuppli Corp.
The so-called “universal” memory would, by then, have grabbed about 80 percent of the market, the market researcher has estimated in a long-range forecast it described as “speculative.”

There is no single semiconductor memory technology today that has all the desired attributes, which on top of speed, density and non-volatility include: low-cost of manufacture, low switching energy and scalability to nanometer-scale dimension.

Interesting article from Engineer Live, about MRAM, OUM and FRAM -
MRAM is the highest profile at the moment, with a 4Mbit prototype shown in December (2003) based around a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) where magnetic material stores the data bit.
"We are very excited about this," said Saied Tehrani, director of MPEM technology at Motorola Semiconductor division. "It really brings two parts of the industry together - semiconductor and magnetics. We have taken the thin film technology and integrated that with the silicon transistor technology and used the magnetic polarisation to store the data and the silicon transistor for reading and writing the information."
The 4Mbit part is built in 0.18µm technology but for commercial products Motorola is looking at jumping a process generation and going straight to the current leading edge 90nm. This is being developed at a plant in Crolles, France, in a joint development with Franco-Italian chip maker ST Microelectronics and Dutch electronics giant Philips.
This would allow 64Mbits or even 128Mbit stand alone devices to be built, but that is not the aim.
So Motorola is planning to embed MRAM into devices alongside other functions. Tehrani would not comment on what these devices would be, except to say that they would be out on the market in 2005 and Motorola would announce the roadmap later this year. "Microcontrollers are a definite possibility for this technology," he said.

The Magnetic Race-Track Memory, a new concept in magnetic non-volatile memory disclosed by IBM Corp of the US in February 2005, is attracting a great deal of attention. If it can be commercialized as advertised it has the potential to revolutionize the memory architecture for computers and consumer electronics. The high potential performance of the new memory is the key, delivering performance on a par with dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) at the manufacturing cost of hard disk drives (HDD). It supports random access, and offers an infinite number of rewrites. Because no mechanism is required, it can be expected to deliver the same robustness as semiconductor memory.

But practical application is still "five to ten years away," said Stuart SP Parkin, IBM fellow SpinApps and director of IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center at IBM.

The mean access time is about 50ns, which is a little longer than MRAM and roughly the same as existing DRAM.

U.S. memory chip maker Micron Technology has stopped R&D work on magnetic RAM and is doubtful about phase-change memory, two approaches to non-volatile memory being pursued elsewhere. The reason Micron is moving away from the technologies is because the company does not see how they would scale effectively with Moore's Law and justify commercialization.

To judge from Durcan's presentation nano-crystalline flash or engineered tunnel barrier (ETB) memory, due to become available in 2006, should appeal to Micron.