SureCore and Intrinsic are collaorating to accelerate time to market for Intrinsic’s ReRAM technology.
Intrinsic’s ReRAM addresses the challenges faced by SoC developers seeking an embedded non-volatile storage vehicle for 22nm and smaller nodes. The technology has many advantages including flash-like density coupled with SRAM access times.
It has become increasingly challenging to scale flash beyond 28nm. This is opening the gate to new memory technologies to fill the gap. The automotive market is watching particularly closely as the drive towards increased autonomy demands higher processing power and much more embedded memory.
Flash will no longer scale with logic presenting a potent challenge to developers of advanced microcontrollers. As it is not practical to build the two technologies on the same chip, vendors are pushed towards a two-chip solution, which is far from ideal from a power perspective.
Intrinsic aims to solve this problem by providing a non-volatile memory that can easily be built on the same advanced process nodes as the logic. This dramatically reduces both power consumption and removes potential data bandwidth bottlenecks and latency caused by using off-chip flash memory.
Intrinsic’s technology can read data 10x to 100x faster and write it 1000x faster than existing solutions and is fabricated using standard processing techniques at the back-end-of-line, making it less complex and less expensive than other ReRAM solutions. This, coupled with its flash-like density and its high temperature resilience, make it especially attractive.
“Intrinsic has invented a breakthrough memory technology that will enable developers to exploit the density and performance of more advanced nodes and integrate its scalable non-volatile memory solution,” says Paul Wells, CEO of sureCore, “we have years of expertise in optimising on-chip memory with our SureFIT Custom SRAM Design Service, It has been a small step to extend this service to encompass Intrinsic’s ReRAM technology and exploit our design environment to deliver the associated verification and characterisation environments underpinning the value of a compiler.”
Mark Dickinson, Intrinsic’s CEO, adds: “Underpinning the sureCore sureFIT service is a suite of powerful tools that will enable us to save many years of development effort had we had to create similar solutions from scratch.”
