December 2005

Ovonyx, Inc. and Samsung Electronics today announced that they have entered into a long-term license agreement under Ovonyx' intellectual property relating to Ovonic Universal Memory (OUM) thin-film semiconductor memory technology.
Ovonyx memory technology uses a reversible phase-change memory process that has been previously commercialized worldwide in rewritable CD and DVD optical memory disks. The Ovonyx array-addressed semiconductor memory technology can be used in applications such as Flash and DRAM memory replacements, as well as in embedded applications in many product areas such as microcontrollers and reconfigurable MOS logic.
"The IT industry embraces change and enhancements which are enabled by advanced semiconductor technologies," said Byung-Il Ryu, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics' Semiconductor R&D Center. "The agreement we announce today will open doors to further development and research on phase-change technology (or OUM nonvolatile memory technology), a prominent solution for next generation memory designs and applications."
"Samsung is the market leader in DRAM and Flash memory production and has made rapid progress towards productizing phase-change memory technology," said Tyler Lowrey, President & CEO of Ovonyx. "Ovonyx looks forward to working with Samsung to commercialize OUM nonvolatile memory products."

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Developers of MRAM in the Far East are taking a keen interest in the Laser 3 Dimensional Atom Probe (3DAP) from Oxford nanoScience Ltd to provide an accurate analysis method to show the atomic level structure in these complex devices.

Oxford nanoScience managing director, Richard Davies said: “The ultra- high density of these devices means that their structures are too small to be examined by even transmission electron microscopy. The Laser 3DAP, however uses a femtosecond laser to evaporate atoms sequentially from the sample before analyzing their mass and original position in the sample. The instrument literally allows us to reconstruct the sample structure atom by atom in 3 dimensions, complete with the chemical identity of each atom.”

“The MRAM structure includes GMR and TMR layers and III-V transistor structures,” he continued. “The Laser 3DAP has already been used to characterize each of these types of structures individually, so should be ideally suited to MRAM investigations. TMR structures can be analysed routinely and the presence of insulating layers presents no problems. Oxide layers as thin as 1 nm have been characterised, although significantly thicker ones can also be analysed”.

The Laser 3DAP was launched during the summer of 2005 and has attracted a huge amount of interest from the semiconductor industry in general, with the introduction of the laser source making the 3DAP technique applicable to semiconductor materials for the first time.

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. presented an MRAM that uses magnesium oxide, rather than an aluminum material, in the write layer. Saied Tehrani, director of MRAM technology, said Freescale will replace aluminum oxide with magnesium oxide, which will improve the bit resistance during the write cycle. Also, the tunneling layer can be thinned slightly.

Sony researchers built a 4-kbit memory cell in a 180-nanometer CMOS process with four-level metal, according to the paper the company present in Washington at IEDM. The MTJ was built of optimized CoFeB material. Sony has also used CoFeB for conventional-MRAM development.
The researchers verified data write speeds of 2 nanoseconds for the experimental device. Circuit simulations indicate the same speed for reads.

The current required to switch the free layer's orientation was 200 microamps, or 1/30 the power required for a conventional MRAM.