We’ve seen a significant amount of investment in R&D and production across the globe over the past couple of years, with governments across the world putting unprecedented focus on this area through both direct investment and corporate incentives. World economies clearly see semiconductors as an area of increasing strategic importance.

Despite economic headwinds, in 2023 we will see continued investments in semiconductor research and production, from both public and private sources. SEMI reports that that construction started on 57 new fabs in 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined. These investments will take time to mature into actual fab capacities, but we are already starting to see some of the earliest investments come to fruition. All this investment is an opportunity for companies that supply technologies for advanced systems on chips (SoCs) such as EDA, equipment, and embedded technologies like Weebit’s ReRAM Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) IP.

In 2023 we will also see an acceleration of the trend towards increased functional integration in areas such as power management ICs (PMICs), audio amplifier ICs and other high-voltage designs for consumer, automotive, industrial, telecom, and medical applications. Historically, such analog/mixed-signal designs were manufactured in more mature process geometries compared to digital designs (such as 130nm and 180nm) but increasing power and cost pressures mean that some of these designs are moving to more advanced nodes where it’s possible to further integrate logic and memory. By integrating high-voltage devices with logic gates and NVM on a single die in a 65nm-40nm bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process, designers can reduce power consumption and increase performance.

System integration is also accelerating in microcontrollers for applications such as automotive, battery operated IoT devices, smart cards and others. These MCUs must support increasingly sophisticated programming while also keeping cost and power to a minimum. Designers can reduce costs and power and increase system speed and security by integrating more resources on-chip and eliminating external memory components. As these designs scale towards smaller process nodes, ultimately 28nm and 22nm, NVM for these devices must be able to scale alongside the other on-chip components while delivering the needed performance, power and cost.

However, for most applications, it’s not economically feasible to embed flash – the traditional NVM –into SoCs below 28nm. Embedded flash faces significant cost, power, and security challenges even with 3D stacking, advanced packaging and chiplet architectures. Because of these integration challenges – and other challenges with flash – more companies in 2023 will be looking for NVM alternatives at advanced nodes.

Emerging NVMs like Resistive RAM (ReRAM), Phase Change Memory (PCM), Magneto Resistive RAM (MRAM), and Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) offer alternatives. Each of these technologies can scale more easily to advanced geometries compared to flash, but each also has its advantages and drawbacks. When considering cost, complexity, power, performance, and other parameters, ReRAM offers the best balance for a wide range of applications.

For new fabs that don’t have legacy flash technology, the transition to a new NVM technology is fairly straightforward, especially when the NVM is integrated at the back-end-of-line (BEOL) like ReRAM. Because it is integrated at BEOL, ReRAM can be adopted once per process node and then it will work for all a node’s variants. In contrast, flash is integrated at the front-end-of-line (FEOL), so it must be adapted to each variant of a node. This FEOL integration also means that companies using flash must often make design tradeoffs that can compromise the other analog components that are integrated in FEOL, leading to overall degraded performance, larger size, and higher cost. These tradeoffs aren’t a factor when designing with a BEOL NVM like ReRAM.

In 2023, we will see ReRAM technologies begin to enter the mainstream. Companies like TSMC and Infineon have announced they will bring ReRAM to market for automotive, and other fabs are starting adopt ReRAM into their IP libraries. At Weebit Nano, we are working with multiple partners to bring our ReRAM IP to SoC designers on a number of processes, targeting a broad range of applications. Our first embedded Weebit ReRAM IP is now available for SkyWater Technology’s S130 process. Weebit ReRAM is fully functional and industry-qualified, delivering significant advantages in terms of cost, power, endurance and reliability.

By: DocMemory
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