Global Foundries teams up with T-Ram

GLOBAL FOUNDRIES has teamed up with the folks at T-Ram Semiconductor, signing a joint development agreement to use T-Ram's Thyristor-RAM embedded memory in fabs for the development of advanced technology nodes.

Designers have long been looking for ways to bung more embedded memory onto chips in ways that will up performance whilst keeping power consumption low.

This has typically been accomplished by sticking SRAM onto the chip. But whilst SRAM is fast, it also has rather low storage density, using six transistors per bit, which takes up a lot of room on a little chip.

T-Ram solves this chip real-estate issue by using what it calls a thyristor instead of a transistor. A thyristor, as we understand it, is a three-junction semiconductor component, which reduces the cell area and allows for higher storage density. This increase in density potentialially allows for much larger on-chip cache memories, making it look all the more promising for things like netbook system-on-chip designs, smartphones and other mobile devices.

It also, according to T-Ram's president and CEO, Sam Nakib, "avoids the fundamental scalability challenges that face 6T-SRAM and other FET-based memory cells."

Indeed, one of the key advantages for Global Foundries, and the reason the fab firm seems to have picked T-Ram, is the technology's scalability as the foundry pushes towards implementing Thyristor-RAM at the 32 nm node and beyond.

"As circuit geometries shrink, T-RAM is not affected by some of the fundamental issues that other embedded memory technologies can encounter," Jason Gorss, GloFo's tech PR told the INQ, adding it could also be used in bulk and SOI processes.

The technology has purportedly already been tested at earlier nodes, but this will be the first implementation in what Gorss calls "a leading-edge process".

Meanwhile, Global Foundries' new senior veep of tech and R&D, Gregg Bartlett, said the embedded memory tech showed "a great deal of potential for use in low-power, high-performance dense cache applications for advanced technology nodes."

Nakib chipped in to add his firm's technology was not only "fully manufacturable and robust," but also boasted "proven yield, reliability, and low-cost of integration in earlier technology nodes". µ