Rambus announced that the company has acquired privately-held Unity Semiconductor, an alternative memory technology company for $35 million. Unity employees have joined Rambus and will continue to develop next-generation nonvolatile memory.
Unity has an interesting technology that has caught the eye of some leading memory firms, including Micron, who had an exclusive right to Unity’s technology. The company’s CMOx is based on oxygen ions moving within a semiconducting material. It’s one species of resistive RAM.
Although Unity has been trying for years to manufacture very high density nonvolatile memory chips, The Memory Guy is not aware that the company has yet produced the chips they have set out to make.
Even so, it’s smart for an IP licensing firm like Rambus to acquire one or more of this kind of firm since eventually we’ll reach the end of NAND scaling. When that occurs some alternative will be required, and the IP holder of the winning technology stands to make tens of times the $35 million price Rambus paid for Unity.
For more information on future technologies and how and why they will replace today’s technologies, see the PCM White paper on the Objective Analysis home page.
