Patents

Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) and GlobalFoundries announced a partnership to jointly research next-generation RRAM memories. The two partners will invest $88 million USD with an aim to demonstrate RRAM memory devices produced on 12-inch wafers.

NTU and GF-Singapore are already collaborating on spintronics - the study of electron spin and its applications, including MRAM memory (NTU and GF are founding members of the Singapore Spintronics Consortium. In this new ReRAM project, 16 researchers will work together to research areas such as circuit design for next-generation smart devices and chip packaging for advanced IoT applications.

Applied Materials unveiled new high-volume manufacturing solutions for next-generation memories - Including MRAM, PCRAM and RRAM. The Endura platform integrates multiple materials engineering technologies along with on-board metrology to create new films and structures.

Applied’s Endura Impulse PVD platform for PCRAM and ReRAM production includes up to nine process chambers integrated under vacuum along with on-board metrology to allow the precise deposition and control of the multi-component materials for these emerging memories.

Yole Developpement says that emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVM) will generate $53 million in sales in 2015, but the market will grow quickly to $4.6 billion 2021. That's a CAGR of 110%!

The market is still limited to niche markets due to the limited densities, but this will change in the near future, and Yole says that the clear go-to market for emerging-NVM will be storage-class memory. High-capacity SCM applications will use either phase-change memory or RRAM memory, while applications that require high endurance and speed will adopt STT-MRAM memories.

Samsung's semiconductor chief Kim Ki-nam says that Samsung is developing next-generation memory technologies, such as MRAM and RRAM. According to Kim "Samsung will commercialize MRAMs and ReRAMs according to our own schedule. We are on our way and will be ready soon"

Samsung targets MRAM as an update to DRAM memory, while RRAM will be used as a storage memory to replace NAND.