What's another simile for sluggishness apart from the movement of glaciers and the mating of tortoises? How about the gestation of technology? Unity Semiconductor has been seven years in the development of its new non-volatile memory technology which it calls CMOx.
"Things always take longer than you think", says Darrell Rinerson, CEO and Founder of Unity who, in 2001, identified as a potential new memory technology, a crosspoint switching effect first observed by IBM's Zurich Research Centre and the University of Houston.
"The switching effects were observed, but the reason for these effects were not understood", says Rinerson, "what we've been doing is to develop a good understanding of the physics behind the switching effects. You have to understand the physical concepts."
"The switching effect occurs in layers of oxides which are not standard materials used in the semiconductor industry", continues Rinerson, "it is based on the movement of ions, specifically oxygen ions. It is analogous to semiconductor switching involving the moving of electrons."
Drily he adds: "It is somewhat difficult to engineer the effects".
What Unity has engineered is a passive rewritable crosspoint memory array that requires no transistors in the memory cell
"We are the only company in the world that can write and read data patterns in a passive cross-point array," says Rinerson.
Will it scale? "Anyone working on a technology is always optimistic", says Rinerson, "scaling is something which you have to do to find out what the problems are. We feel, we believe, with reasonable confidence, this will be scalable. If Unity has truly identified the memory effects, then CMOx is the best candidate to continuing memory scaling."
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