Adesto Technologies and TPSCo Announce CBRAM Manufacturing Agreement
Adesto Technologies, a provider of application-specific, ultra-low power non-volatile memory products, has announced it has signed an agreement with TPSCo (TowerJazz Panasonic Semiconductor Company), the leading analog foundry in Japan, to manufacture Adesto's 45 nm CBRAM products at TPSCo's 300mm Hokuriku, Japan fabrication facility.
"This agreement is a major milestone for Adesto and resistive RAM technology," said Narbeh Derhacobian, chief executive officer of Adesto. "Adding 45nm production with TPSCo is an important step forward to unlocking the full advantages of CBRAM technology and will enable development of new families of products and expanded market opportunities. We're eager to work with TPSCo's comprehensive range of foundry solutions to help us ramp our next-generation CBRAM products."
Scaling CBRAM to 45 nm offers multiple advantages, including benefits in speed, power consumption and memory capacity. "Adesto's commercially available CBRAM products today already operate at lower voltage, write more than 50x faster and consume 5x less energy as compared to standard non-volatile memories," said Ishai Naveh, vice president of Marketing at Adesto. "But we believe emerging IoT, mobile and energy-harvesting applications demand a new paradigm for performance and ultra-low energy use. At 45nm, customers can leverage CBRAM's advantages and optimize for energy, speed and the ability to execute-in-place. This aligns well with requirements for IoT, wearable, and other long-life battery devices, some of which we believe will be designed to operate for years without a battery change."
Today, Adesto manufactures its CBRAM products using a 130nm process at Altis Semiconductor. The addition of the 45nm node option for CBRAM will allow Adesto to manufacture devices with additional logic and intelligence, including support for standard foundry IP. This benefit is possible since the digital component of CBRAM devices at 45 nm is more than 20x smaller than standard Flash devices providing additional design area to add premium features.
"Adesto's innovative memory opens the door to new capabilities and provides IoT designers significant freedom to realize their performance and energy consumption goals," said Guy Eristoff, chief executive officer of TPSCo. "We are excited to enable Adesto in addressing the needs of this growing market segment as Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020."
The companies anticipate an approximate two-year ramp to bring up CBRAM technology in its new fab.
