Crossbar Inc., a developer of resistive random access memory (ReRAM) technology, will provide China’s leading silicon foundry with blocks of intellectual property to license to customers under the terms of a strategic partnership announced Friday (March 11).

The deal will enable customers of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) to integrate non-volatile ReRAM blocks based on its 40nm CMOS manufacturing process into microcontrollers and SoCs aimed at a wide swatch of markets, including the Internet of Things, wearable electronics, tablets, consumer, industrial and automotive, SMIC (Shanghai) said.

George Minassian, CEO and co-founder of Crossbar, said through a statement that the deal marks the beginning of the “licensing phase” and a “major stepping stone toward the commercialization of ReRAM technology.”

Minassian said Crossbar’s ReRAM and SMIC’s manufacturing process would enable new memory architectures with tighter security, lower power consumption, more capacity and faster access time.

“Designers of highly integrated MCUs and SoCs need non-volatile memory technologies that are easy to integrate into their products and can be manufactured using standard CMOS logic processes,” Minassian said.

Crossbar (Santa Clara, Calif.) says its RRAM’s CMOS compatibility and scalability to small process geometries enables the integration of non-volatile memory blocks at the same process nodes of MCUs and SoCs. ReRAM cells are integrated in standard CMOS processes between two metal lines of standard CMOS wafers, according to the company.

Crossbar was founded in 2010, based on ReRAM technology licensed from the University of Michigan. The company introduced its first RRAM prototype chip in 2013.

ReRAM is one of several technologies vying to replace flash memory in future storage systems. To date, ReRAM’s commercial success has been limited, largely due to its cost.

By: DocMemory
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