August 28, 2018 -- Weebit Nano (ASX: WBT), the Israel-based semiconductor company seeking to develop and commercialise the next generation of memory technology, has produced the first packaged units containing memory arrays based on its Silicon Oxide Resistive RAM (SiOx ReRAM) technology.
These have been packaged into devices known as chips, allowing the company to ship its memory technology to partners who can then start working with them. This is an important step in Weebit Nano’s productisation and commercialisation effort as it enables further testing and refining of the company’s memory technology. The first memory chips will be delivered to universities to research the use of ReRAM technology in neuromorphic computing, which is used in the development of Artificial Intelligence, with additional chips planned to be shipped to commercial partners once they engage to explore the possibility to work with Weebit Nano’s technology.
Until now, testing of Weebit Nano’s technology was solely conducted at wafer level in the lab adjacent to the production line at Leti, the company’s production partner in France. As testing has progressed, Weebit Nano is now extracting memory arrays from wafers and packaging them into packaged devices – the form in which memory chips are used by customers in phones, PCs or storage devices. This allows Weebit Nano to conduct additional tests outside the lab, and partners to use them in their facilities.
Commenting on the milestone, Coby Hanoch, CEO of Weebit Nano, said: “We are continuing to make good progress improving the quality of our memory technology in preparation for its use in commercial products. This next step towards commercialisation enables partners to use our memory chips in their facilities, and importantly allows them to evaluate our technology as part of their decision process to engage with us. Furthermore, we are very excited that some of these initial packaged chips will be used by universities to research neuromorphic computing, a key element in the development of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence systems.”
This latest development comes on the back of the company achieving the significant milestone in June of demonstrating a 1Mb (1 Megabit > 1 million bits) capacity ReRAM array at 40nm using silicon oxide (SiOx).
This meant Weebit Nano’s ReRAM technology had reached the capacity of memory larger than that currently used across most of the embedded non-volatile memory (NVM) market, which is the first market segment the company is targeting and is currently estimated to be worth over US$25 billion.
The 1Mb initial test, conducted in CEA/Leti facilities in Grenoble, France, demonstrated the capability of addressing and programming nearly all the memory cells and were achieved without using performance improvement techniques such as redundancy, which are commonly used in the memory industry to achieve programmability of 100 per cent of the array cells.
