Monday, January 24, 2011
Unity Semiconductor announced today that it has entered into a two year joint development program with Micron Technology to develop its CMOx technology as a flash memory replacement.
Today, advanced NAND flash memories are currently being manufactured with feature sizes between 27 nanometer and 24 nanometer. In the race to reduce costs, NAND flash manufacturers are developing technology nodes in the low 2x nanometer range. However, in the near future, floating gate NAND flash will encounter fundamental scaling limitations.
NAND flash suppliers are actively exploring a variety of alternatives including spin-torque-transfer MRAM, phase change memory, conductive bridge memory or metal oxide-based valence change memory. However as lithographic scaling becomes more challenging, companies are turning their sights to vertically stacked implementations of memory cells or 3D memory. 3D memory technologies offer the promise of continued increases in storage capacities and lower cost per bit necessary to enable emerging applications such as solid state drives.
Among the candidates are stacked NAND technologies employing charge trapping technology, vertical memory cells etched in a pillar and stackable cross-point memory arrays. Unity's CMOx in a cross-point memory array is one of the candidates to replace floating gate NAND flash memories within this decade.
In the next 3-5 years, the first products based on a 3D memory technology is likely.
By: DocMemory
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