Most memory industry participants view emerging memories as the eventual path of the business: There’s no doubt that today’s memory technologies will stop scaling, and that new memory technologies will need to replace today’s leading technologies both in the embedded and stand-alone spaces. This includes DRAM, NAND flash, NOR flash, and SRAM. Because this outlook is held by nearly everyone in the industry, all major memory manufacturers are investing in alternative memory technologies. The leading players are researching multiple technologies at the same time.
Meanwhile, the industry outlook has allowed many university research projects and other similar efforts to gain funding to develop new memory types, spawning a large number of small single-technology companies tightly focused on one technology or another: ReRAM, MRAM, FRAM, and others, including such highly-differentiated technologies as carbon nanotubes and printable polymers.
In our Emerging Memory report Tom Coughlin and I did our best to capture and describe all of these companies and their efforts. All of them appear in the table below.
These companies also appear in a more legible format in the lists below. Each of the companies is analyzed in the report, with a description of the technology or technologies that they are developing.
There are actually two lists, each in alphabetical order. The first includes memory manufacturers, as well as companies that are developing technologies that they intend to license to others for production. The second list profiles semiconductor capital equipment vendors – tool makers – who are developing tools that can be used for the production of emerging memory technologies. This report has a significant focus on how these new devices will be produced. Since the majority of these technologies use new materials that are not commonly found in semiconductor production, tools must be redesigned or modified to work with these new materials.
The two lists below provide the names of the companies that were analyzed as a part of this report.
Memory Companies
- 4DS Memory
- Adesto Technologies
- Avalanche Technology
- BAE Systems
- BeSang
- Cobham-Aeroflex
- Crocus Technology
- Crossbar
- Cypress Semiconductor
- EverSpin
- Ferroelectric Memory Company
- Fujitsu Semiconductor
- Grandis
- HPE
- Honeywell
- IBM
- imec
- Intel
- Knowm
- Micron Technology
- Nantero
- NEC
- NVE
- Ovonyx
- Panasonic
- Qualcomm
- Rambus
- Ramtron
- Renesas Electronics
- Samsung Semiconductor
- Seagate Technology
- SK hynix
- Sony Corporation
- Spin Transfer Technologies
- Symetrix
- TCLab
- TDK
- Thin Film Electronics
- Texas Instruments (TI)
- Toshiba Memory Corporation
- Unidym
- Weebit Nano
- Western Digital/SanDisk
- Semiconductor Fab Companies
- Global Foundries
- SMIC
- TowerJazz
- TSMC
- UMC
Capital Equipment Manufacturers
- Applied Materials
- Canon-Anelva
- Capres A/S
- Hitachi High Technology
- Hprobe
- Integral Solutions (ISI)
- Jusung Engineering
- Keysight Technologies
- KLA Tencor
- Lam Research
- Magnetic Solutions
- MagOasis
- MicroSense
- Neoark
- Singulus Technologies
- Tokyo Electron
- Ulvac
- Veeco
This is a long list, yet we know that we have inadvertently missed some that should be included the next time the report is updated. Please let us know if you find a company we overlooked.
It’s important to note, though, that once the market has settled on a small number of technologies then we should expect for the list to consolidate to fewer than half the companies that appear today, either because smaller companies have been absorbed into larger ones, or because certain efforts failed to gain the required momentum and dropped out.
We welcome readers who are interested in learning about all of these companies to look at the other posts in this series and to consider purchasing the Emerging Memory report which can be purchased for immediate download by clicking HERE.
This post is the fifth of a series on emerging memory technologies, looking at it from several angles, and predicting how these technologies will change both the chip market and the market for the capital equipment used to produce these chips. It consists of excerpts from a recently-released report from Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates: Emerging Memories Poised to Explode.
There are six sections:
- Why Emerging Memories are Necessary
- Understanding Bit Selectors
- The Technologies: MRAM, ReRAM, PCM/XPoint, FRAM, etc.
- Process Equipment Requirements
- Emerging Memory Companies
- Forecasting Emerging Memories
The Memory Guy has provided these to help readers understand the emerging memory technologies and markets. Questions and comments are appreciated.
Have you been able to test any of Netlist’s new products and what do you think they offer to the segment? I did notice they are not on your list
Justin,
This series is about different products than those that Netlist makes.
Netlist makes special NVDIMMs based on standard DRAM and NAND flash technology that appear to the system either as very large DRAM DIMMs or as super-fast SSDs.
The memory technologies in this series are vying to take the place of standard DRAM, SRAM, and NAND or NOR flash.
Thanks for the comment,
Jim