January 2017

In March 2016 Crossbar announced its strategic partnership with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) to co-develop and produce RRAM technologies. Crossbar now says it started to sample embedded RRAM chips from SMIC.

SMIC, China's largest semiconductor foundry, is using a 40nm process, and Crossbar says that it plans for a 28nm process - and even 10nm or lower down the road. The chip design uses non-conductive amorphous silicon (a-SI) technology. Crossbar's chips can either use a 1T1R architecture (1 transistor per RRAM, which offers the lowest latency and so useful for embedded memory and caching) or 1TnR (which uses up to 2,000 cells per transistor using a crossbar scheme - which makes for higher density chips useful for storage).

Researchers from the Guizhou Institute of Technology in China produced RRAM devices using finely ground used egg shells. These devices were not very durable - they only lasted about 100 write cycles...

To create the devices, the researchers ground the egg shells until they got a 'nanoscale' powder. They then dried it and dissolved it in a solution. The solution was than used to coat a substrate to form the electrolyte part of the RRAM device.

A team of international researchers, from China (Nanyang Technological University), Singapore (NTU) and Germany (RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Juelich) developed a technique to turn RRAM chips into logic processors.

The researchers say that these kind of processors eliminate the need to transfer data between memory storage and the computational unit (as it is now the same unit) - and so these processors could be at least two times faster than current processors. The new processors will also be smaller than current designs.