Nanterro just came out of stealth this week and bagged $31.5M in a Series E funding round. Apparently, Nanterro has been developing a new form of non-volatile RAM (NRAM), based on Carbon Nanotubes (CNT), which seems to work like an old T-bar switch, only in the NM sphere and using CNT for the wiring.
They were founded in 2001, and are finally ready to emerge from stealth. Nanterro already has 175+ issued patents, with another 200 patents pending. The NRAM is currently in production at 7 CMOS fabs already and they are sampling 4Mb NRAM chips to a number of customers.
NRAM vs. NAND
Performance of the NRAM is on a par with DRAM (~100 times faster than NAND), can be configured in 3D and supports MLC (multi-bits per cell) configurations. NRAM also supports orders of magnitude more (assume they mean writes) accesses and stores data much longer than NAND.
The only question is the capacity, with shipping NAND on the order of 200Gb, NRAM is about 2**14X behind NAND. Nanterre claims that their CNT-NRAM CMOS process can be scaled down to <5nm. Which is one or two generations below the current NAND scale factor and assuming they can pack as many bits in the same area, should be able to compete well with NAND.They claim that their NRAM technology is capable of Terabit capacities (assumed to be at the 5nm node).
The other nice thing is that Nanterro says the new NRAM uses less power than DRAM, which means that in addition to attaining higher capacities, DRAM like access times, it will also reduce power consumption.
It seems a natural for mobile applications. The press release claims it was already tested in space and there are customers looking at the technology for automobiles. The company claims the total addressable market is ~$170B USD. Which probably includes DRAM and NAND together.
CNT in CMOS chips?
Key to Nanterro’s technology was incorporating the use of CNT in CMOS processes, so that chips can be manufactured on current fab lines. It’s probably just the start of the use of CNT in electronic chips but it’s one that could potentially pay for the technology development many times over. CNT has a number of characteristics which would be beneficial to other electronic circuitry beyond NRAM.
How quickly they can ramp the capacity up from 4Mb seems to be a significant factor. Which is no doubt, why they went out for Series E funding.
So we have another new non-volatile memory technology.On the other hand, these guys seem to be a long ways away from the lab, with something that works today and the potential to go all the way down to 5nm.
It should interesting as the other NV technologies start to emerge to see which one generates sufficient market traction to succeed in the long run. Especially as NAND doesn’t seem to be slowing down much.
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