imec looks to develop sub 20nm carbon nanotube based memory

The collaboration will focus on Nantero's non volatile random access memory (NRAM) chip, with the arrays manufactured, tested and characterised at imec's facilities Carbon nanotube memory is based on the carbon nanotube 'CNTs', cylindrical carbon molecules about a nanometre across and up to a millimetre long, which exhibit exceptional strength, electrical and conduction properties. "After review of the progress to date by Nantero and its manufacturing partners, we decided that this CNT based non volatile memory has multiple, very attractive characteristics for next generation highly scaled memory," said Luc Van den hove, imec's ceo. "By taking a leadership position in this area of development, in partnership with Nantero, we will be able to bring substantial benefit to our member companies." Nantero has already fabricated high yielding 4Mb arrays of NRAM in cmos production environments, with several important performance advantages. Write speed has been shown to be as fast as three nanoseconds; endurance is expected to be unlimited and has been tested so far to over a trillion cycles, with low operating power and superior high temperature retention. "Together, Nantero and imec can develop and demonstrate this form of memory for future applications below 20nm such as terabit scale memory arrays and ultra fast gigabit scale nonvolatile cache memories," commented Jo de Boeck, cto of imec. "NRAM holds clear promise in aggressively scaled non volatile memory applications and, if we can demonstrate the suitable endurance and speed specifications, NRAM could even provide an alternative for dram that is facing scaling limitations beyond 18nm."