Unity Semiconductor, the
Rinerson has two strategies for avoiding commoditisation for when he brings Unity's memory technology, CMOx, to market:
One way is the traditional method of extensive patent protection - Unity has 60 issued and 90 pending patents which will be combined with a 'selective licensing' policy which will control the spread of the technology.
The other way of stopping the technology becoming commoditised is through an
innovative approach to manufacturing.
Unity's wafers will be made in two different fabs. The first three layers of metal will be made on a CMOS logic process at a Japanese fab.
"We have entered into a relationship with a Japanese company with its own 90nm CMOS logic process to make the base layers (three layers of metal) for the 64G memory", said Rinerson.
The idea is that the wafer then goes to another company's fab (as yet not chosen) which has (or will have) a 35nm process to put on the memory layers (4 physical layers).
"The mask count will be only modestly higher than the mask count for NAND," said Rinerson, "and the wafer cost will be 1.5X more expensive than NAND, but the die cost will be less than NAND because the density is 4X NAND density for the same area of silicon."
The idea of splitting the front end processing into two stages is to try and prevent commoditisation of the technology with no fab having the capability to make the whole chip.
It sounds like they will avoid commoditisation by adding more middle men into the process? Why split up the process into a 90nm fab and a 35nm fab? Shouldn't the single 35nm fab be able to lay down 90nm structures by itself if needed?
Yousuf, you're right, of courese, but somehow they don't want any one fab to do both. Don't ask me how it helps avoid commoditisation becasue I don't know, but they say they've found a way to prevent it by splitting the front-end processing. When I have some time, I'll ask them how and why