The world’s first 3D NAND-like DRAM cell array it has been developed to help solve DRAM’s capacity bottleneck and replace the entire 2D DRAM market. Relevant patent applications were published with the United States Patent Application Publication on April 6, 2023.
“3D X-DRAM will be the future growth driver for the semiconductor industry,” said Andy Hsu, Founder and CEO of NEO Semiconductor. “Our invention, compared to the other solutions in the market today, is very simple and less expensive to manufacture and scale. The industry can expect to achieve 8X density and capacity improvements per decade with our 3D X-DRAM.”
NEO Semiconductor’s 3D X-DRAM is a 3D NAND-like DRAM cell array structure based on capacitor-less floating body cell technology. Crucially, it can be manufactured using existing 3D NAND-like processes and only needs one mask to define the bit line holes and form the cell structure inside the holes.
This cell structure simplifies the process steps and provides a high-speed, high-density, low-cost, and high-yield solution.
Based on Neo’s own estimates, 3D X-DRAM technology is able to achieve 128 Gb density with 230 layers, which is 8 times today’s DRAM density.
Adopting 3D X-DRAM involves leveraging the current mature 3D NAND process only, unlike many of the alternatives for moving DRAM to 3D proposed by academic papers and researched by the memory industry.
Without 3D X-DRAM, according to the company, the industry faces waiting potential decades, navigating inevitable manufacturing disruptions, and mitigating unacceptable yield and cost challenges, and is able to address the increase in demand for high-performance and high-capacity memory semiconductors driven by the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
“Evolving from 2D to 3D architectures has introduced compelling and extremely valuable benefits to NAND flash, so achieving a similar evolution for DRAM is highly desirable industry-wide,” said Jay Kramer, President of Network Storage Advisors. “NEO Semiconductor’s 3D X-DRAM allows the memory industry to leverage current technologies, nodes and processes for enhancing DRAM products with NAND-like 3D architectures.”
