After seven years of labor in secrecy, a Silicon Valley start-up is disclosing one of the most radical efforts yet to replace today's memory chips.
Unity Semiconductor Corp. hopes to provide an alternative to chips known as NAND flash memory, which are a mainstay of products such as digital cameras and Apple Inc.'s iPod music player. The closely held company says its technology can store four times the amount of data as NAND chips of the same size, and record data five to ten times faster.
Unity said it has working prototypes but doesn't expect to offer chips commercially for two years. Besides completing a finished product, analysts say, the start-up must find a big manufacturing partner.
"For anybody to come out with a new memory it must be adopted by one of the major NAND makers," said Alan Niebel, an analyst at Web-Feet Research who has been briefed on Unity's plans.
Unity Chief Executive Darrell Rinerson, formerly an executive at memory chip specialist Micron Technology Inc., said Unity hopes to forge a partnership with an existing memory chip maker, but didn't disclose a candidate.
NAND chips, which retain data even when electrical power is switched off, have become an essential commodity in the tech sector. But price competition has whipsawed suppliers. The research firm iSuppli estimates world-wide sales of NAND chips fell 15% in 2008 to $11.8 billion.
NAND also faces an uncertain future. As companies keep shrinking circuit dimensions, many experts believe that at some point it may become impossible to boost the storage capacity of the technology any further.
--------------------
Prominent candidates to succeed today's memory-chip technology
* PCM: Phase-change memory records data by causing material to change from a crystalline state, or phase, to a disordered state.
* MRAM: Magnetoresistive random-access memory uses magnetic charges rather than electric charges to store data.
* FRAM: Ferroelectric random-access memory is another technology for exploiting magnetic rather than electric charges.
* RRAM: Resistive random-access memory stores data as a change in the electrical resistance of materials under varying circumstances.
* NRAM: A technology based on carbon nanotubes, materials that can be fabricated in ultrasmall dimensions.
Source: WSJ Research
--------------------
Unity's approach is particularly unusual, dispensing with basic concepts such as the use of electrons to store data. The company bases its technology on ions -- charged particles formed by the addition or loss of electrons -- and the way they move through certain materials, Mr. Rinerson said.
Memory chips, which are fabricated on silicon wafers, typically store data using transistors in cells that are laid out in a two-dimensional pattern. Unity says its technology, which uses no transistors, makes it possible to stack four cells on top of each other and pack more data in less space.
In another unorthodox tactic, Unity plans to buy partially finished wafers from services called foundries. Mr. Rinerson said costly production tools will only be needed to add final layers on the wafers. As a result, a new factory to make Unity's chips might cost around $1 billion, instead of $4 billion, he said.
Unity plans to jointly finance a factory with the aid of the unnamed manufacturing partner; both companies would sell a portion of the output under their own brands. With the aid of about 60 patents issued so far, Mr. Rinerson said Unity's intent is "to keep others out, to not allow this technology to be commoditized."
Unity, which has raised close to $75 million in venture capital so far, expects by mid-2011 to offer a commercial chip that stores 64 gigabits -- about twice the capacity of the most advanced NAND chips on the data centers market now. The will help in applications where chips have played a limited role to date, Mr. Rinerson predicted.
But the company faces many hurdles, including proving it can churn out chips at competitive prices. Jim Handy, an analyst at the market-research firm Objective Analysis, said other NAND alternatives have been proposed before that never met that challenge. "The memory game is always about cost," he said.
