Weebit Nano Limited, a leading developer and licensor of advanced memory technologies for the global semiconductor industry, and tier-1 semiconductor foundry DB HiTek have taped-out (released to manufacturing) a demonstration chip integrating Weebit's embedded Resistive Random-Access Memory (ReRAM or RRAM) module in DB HiTek's 130 nm Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process. The highly integrated demo chips will be used for testing and qualification ahead of customer production, while demonstrating the performance and robustness of Weebit's technology.

This important milestone in the collaboration between Weebit and DB HiTek (previously announced on 19 October 2023) was completed on-schedule as part of the technology transfer process. The companies are working to make Weebit ReRAM available to DB HiTek customers for integration in their systems on chips (SoCs) as embedded non-volatile memory (NVM), and aim to have the technology qualified and ready for production in the second quarter of the 2025 calendar year. Weebit ReRAM is available now to select DB HiTek customers for design prototyping ahead of production.

Graphene has been hailed for some time now as the next natural successor to silicon, today's most used medium for semiconductor technology. However, even before such more exotic solutions to current semiconductor technology are employed (and we are still way off that future, at least when it comes to mass production), engineers and researchers seem to be increasing their focus in one specific part of computing: internal communication between components.

Typically, communication between a computer's Central Processing Unit (CPU) and a system's memory (usually DRAM) have occurred through a bus, which is essentially a communication highway between data stored in the DRAM, and the data that the CPU needs to process/has just finished processing. The fastest CPU and RAM is still only as fast as the bus, and recent workloads have been increasing the amount of data to be processed (and thus transferred) by orders of magnitude. As such, engineers have been trying to figure out ways of increasing communication speed between the CPU and the memory subsystem, as it is looking increasingly likely that the next bottlenecks in HPC will come not through lack of CPU speed or memory throughput, but from a bottleneck in communication between those two.

Emerging from stealth-mode today, Crossbar, Inc., a start-up company pioneering a new category of very high capacity and high-performance non-volatile memory, unveiled its Crossbar Resistive RAM (RRAM) technology. This new generation of non-volatile memory will be capable of storing up to one terabyte (TB) of data on a single 200mm2 chip, enabling massive amounts of information, such as 250 hours of HD movies, to be stored and played back from an IC smaller than a postage stamp. Crossbar today also announced it has developed a working Crossbar memory array at a commercial fab, a major milestone in the development of new memory technology, signaling its readiness to begin the first phase of productization.

Due to its simple three-layer structure, Crossbar technology can be stacked in 3D, delivering multiple terabytes of storage on a single chip. Its simplicity, stackability and CMOS compatibility enable logic and memory to be easily integrated onto a single chip at the latest technology node, a capability not possible with other traditional or alternative non-volatile memory technologies.