Crossbar

Crossbar chip structure

“The memory market is looking to new technologies to take over once flash reaches its scaling limit,” said Jim Handy, the director at research firm Objective Analysis. “Crossbar’s impressive progress in the development of a manufacturable RRAM gives a big boost to this popular alternative memory.”

Yatin Mundkur, a partner at Artiman Ventures, said the production of the first chip moves the company one step closer to commercialization. Crossbar believes it can write data to its chip at 140 megabytes per second, compared to 7 megabytes a second for flash. Read performance is 17 megabytes per second, with a random read latency of 30 nanoseconds.

The company has just 20 employees. It plans to create its own chips and sell them on the market, but it will also license its technology to system-on-a-chip vendors that would combine RRAM with other components on the same chip.

With Crossbar chips, mobile phones and tablets would have significantly faster storage, better playback, and smoother backup and archiving. On the enterprise side, vendors could create solid-state drives and cloud computing devices in data centers. RRAM could also be used in the “internet of things” thanks to its better battery life and lower costs. It could work in applications such as smart meters and thermostats. Minassian said RRAM could also make wearable computers such as Google Glass much more functional.

The Crossbar memory cell is based on three simple layers: A nonmetallic bottom electrode, an amorphous silicon switching medium, and a metallic top electrode. The resistance-switching mechanism is based on the formation of a filament in the switching material when a voltage is applied between the two electrodes. That is the basic structure of a memory cell, which is repeated over and over again in order to store the ones and zeroes of digital information.

Sherry Garber, a founding partner at analyst firm Convergent Semiconductors, said, “RRAM is widely considered the obvious leader in the battle for a next generation memory, and Crossbar is the company most advanced, showing a working demo that proves the manufacturability of RRAM. This is a significant development in the industry, as it provides a clear path to commercialization of a new storage technology, capable of changing the future landscape of electronics innovation.”

Crossbar said it has filed 100 patents, with 30 already issued.

Michael Yang, a senior analyst for memory and storage at market researcher IHS, said, “Ninety percent of the data we store today was created in the past two years. The creation and instant access of data has become an integral part of the modern experience, continuing to drive dramatic growth for storage for the foreseeable future. However, the current storage medium, planar NAND, is seeing challenges as it reaches the lower lithographies, pushing against physical and engineering limits. The next generation nonvolatile memory, such as Crossbar’s RRAM, would bypass those limits, and provide the performance and capacity necessary to become the replacement memory solution.”