One name that has been offered as a potential partner is IM Flash Technologies LLC (Lehi, Utah), a NAND flash manufacturing joint venture between Intel Corp. and Micron Technologies Inc. although Unity favors an Asian location for a wafer dedicated to making its perovskite-based memory.

The good news is that such as fab will be a little bit cheaper to build than a leading-edge logic fab, because it will house what is akin to a back-end-of-line [BEOL] process. Unity plans to take wafers and put down the CMOS circuitry for the control, reading and writing at a foundry before using a shared BEOL wafer fab to lay down multiple planes of its relatively simple cross-point memory.

IM Flash Technologies LLC (Lehi, Utah) is an obvious candidate for Unity to partner with. After all Darrel Rinerson, president and CEO of Unity (Sunnyvale, Calif.), spent a significant part of his career at Micron. However, the fact that IM Flash is located in the United States might count against the company.

"We want to be a product company not a licensing company, so we will partner with an IDM," Rinerson said. But Rinerson also said that, rather than ask an IDM to run RRAM wafers through an established wafer fab, Unity would expect to raise money to either build or take a share in the production facility. "Unity would also participate in the BEOL fab. We're in discussions right now. But we're not committed," Rinerson said.

When asked if IM Flash Technologies was on Unity's partnership radar, Rinerson said: "IM Flash Technology; they are a possibility. But Taiwan would be a good location. A BEOL fab in Asia makes sense."

By: DocMemory
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