Altis Semiconductor, located in Essonne, France, is known to those following new and emerging memory technologies as the previous site of much of the MRAM joint development of IBM and Infineon, as well as Infineon’s own efforts as an Axon licensee in 2006. Originally established under IBM-France and having gained a wide range of experience in memory technologies, the Altis facility today is an independent enterprise already serving several market leaders in industrial, computer, consumer, micro-controller, and networking market segments.
This announcement from Adesto and Altis highlights a gradual shift in the competitive landscape among the developers of new and emerging memory technologies. Since we first became involved in these technologies over eight years ago, the leading edge of competition has clearly extended beyond creating investment interest based on technical papers and spreadsheets. We have now truly entered the arena in which the manufacturability of the technology begins to dominate the discussions.
By way of measuring the increased attention to manufacturing progress of emerging memory technologies over the past year, we can point to the ongoing production of MRAM and particularly Ramtron’s FeRAM strategy with its fab partner IBM. Also noteworthy are Samsung’s PCM gambit into cell phones late in 2010, RUSNANO’s commitment to provide a turnkey TAS-MRAM facility in the Moscow area in conjunction with Crocus, and now the entry of Altis into the production of Adesto’s CBRAM.
This most recent announcement certainly does not close the door to other technologies that also appear to be on the cusp of production, such as Grandis’ STT MRAM. Companies with considerable internal investment potential, such as HP’s Memristor program and additional programs from IBM and Samsung, are also certainly not shut out of the competition.
We also continue to point out the growing number of new interfaces and applications such as Enterprise SSDs as an indicator of the ability of memory technologies to be accepted for a wider set of performance attributes than was the practice for commodity DRAMs during the extention of mainframe architectures down to desktop personal computers.
The corollary of this shift toward OEM acceptance of higher value proposition memory technologies leads us to believe that the competition among suppliers of new and emerging memory technologies will not lead to a single dominant commodity configuration at this phase of Makimoto’s wave.
However, the importance of the manufacturing strategy timeline for any new and emerging memory technology has clearly been elevated over the past year.
www.convergentsemiconductors.com - Global Analysis of Memory Strategies and Issues
