Transistor-less semiconductor memory denser and faster than NAND

Unity Semiconductor, an U.S. based start up has pioneered new semiconductor non-volatile memory chip offering 4x higher density and 10x faster speed than NAND flash memory.

Headed by an x-Micron and x-AMD executive Darrell Rinerson who is the Chairman, President & CEO of this semiconductor memory innovator company is working from past 7 years without any visibility to the outside world, is now close to achieve mass producible 64 Giga bits chips. The first volume shipment is expected sometime in 2011 with workable samples in 2010.

Most interesting part is, the basic memory cell of this technology named CMOx is not a transistor based. It's crosspoint array made using conducting metal-oxide material.

This memory is looked more as magnetic disk drive replacement technology along with NAND flash memory replacement.

Unity Semiconductor to follow a fab-lite policy for producing these memory chips by partnering with semiconductor fab owner. Company also plans to license IPs to other semiconductor device developers for better proliferation of this technology.

CMOx devices support the semiconductor manufacturing technology nodes down to 22nm.
On the power consumption front, Unity says, these memory cells consume 1 micro amps of current for writing into the cell.

Unity projects a fatty market of $25billion US$ by year 2013 for products built using this memory with the replacement of Gigabits with Terabits capacity.

Unity Memory explains, The switching concept used by Unity in CMOx different from that used in today's flash technology. The memory effect of CMOx technology is based upon the atomicscale movement of ionic charge carriers. CMOx can be utilized to form a passive cross-point multi-layer memory array, as it does not require a transistor per cell. Other memory technologies, such as phase-change memory (PCM) and magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM), use a transistor per cell and are not amenable to the cross-point multi-layer chip architecture.

Unity Semiconductor's multi-layer cross-point array utilizes a resistance change element (although it's not a Resistive RAM (RRAM) memory cell such as is being developed by a few other companies). Rather, in theCMOx technology, conduction is uniform across the device instead of being filamentary, allowing for more reliable and predictable scaling to future process nodes.

Another notable advantage is it uses same CMOS fabrication technology process used for making normal VLSI chips.

The initial devices to work at clock frequencies of 100 MHz and data rate of 200MB/sec.

Unity Memory has received a funding close to $100 million from venture capitalists and undisclosed hard-disk drive manufacturer. Company holds 60 patents and another 90 are in the approval process.

Electronic industry is keenly looking for a semiconductor device to replace SRAM, DRAM, flash and memory disk drives based on single non-volatile technology.
These devices have to be as fast as SRAM and offer size, cost, storage and power saving benefits better than flask and disk drives. This new breakthrough by Unity Semiconductor is a step closer but still quite away from replacing DRAM and SRAM.