There was a recent—and extremely brief—reference to a joint development program between Sony and Micron on ReRAM that was reported from comments made at a recent media roundtable. This article on November 28 attracts more speculation due to the lack of details rather than the information contained in the press release.
"(Jiji Press English News Service Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Tokyo, Nov. 28 (Jiji Press)--Sony Corp. said Monday it has started to develop a next-generation memory chip with Micron Technology Inc. of the United States.
Sony aims to make the resistance random access memory, or ReRAM, commercially available over the next three or four years.
The chip has the potential to become a major business, Sony Executive Deputy President Hiroshi Yoshioka said at a press conference."
Considering Micron’s previous high visibility acquisition of Intel’s Phase Change Memory (PCM) program, these new announcement are likely part of the regular activity of all memory companies to keep abreast of any potentially critical new technologies.
However, Micron already has a long history in ReRAM that can be traced back to there 2002 licensing of Axon Technologies’ Programmable Metallization Cell (PMC) technology.
Axon’s program is considered by many to be the initial source of the current interest in the growing family of resistive memory cell technologies. You may recall that Infineon was developing a version of the technology under the name of CBRAM that was based on a 2004 license with Axon. As IMEC and other companies continue to explore a wide range of materials that broadly fall into that category of resistive RAM technologies, the ReRAM with the most momentum at the moment is likely the Adesto development program that had also acquired the Infineon/Qimonda CBRAM IP.
While the public perception of memory technologies tends to assume that no new technology will be acceptable until it reaches the same cost per bit of DRAM or NAND, we believe that the continued interest in these new and emerging technologies is based on finding other market entry points and an expectation of providing high value to new applications.
In the specific case of Micron’s recently announced activities in these two additional technologies, it does raise the question of how that company can best allocate resources among DRAM, NAND, Hybrid Memory Cube, Reduced Latency DRAM, PCM, ReRAM, and STT MRAM. However since Micron remains the oldest existing high-volume memory company and has therefore weathered more market and technology storms than any other memory company, they have certainly gained the experience to combine these technologies into a cohesive package.
Even if this does look like an unworkable mash-up at first glance, we also believe that the performance attributes of PCM, ReRAM, and STT MRAM will all eventually support different applications anyway. As we have stated before, our market model is one in which the value proposition of the memory technologies increases as the industry moves further away from the desktop PC era and into the new era of multiple targets for the development of new memory technologies.
While it is not clear yet how quickly these new memory technologies will reach high volume production, there are two trends that are becoming more pronounced. One trend we have previously reported is that OEMs are asking for a wider range of memory technology performance attributes than any time in the past.
Micron’s recent technology announcements underline the second trend—that memory companies also anticipate changes in the traditional market conditions and are responding with technology development commitments for new and emerging memory technologies.
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