Unity Postpones CMOX Commercialisation

Commercialisation of Unity Semiconductor’s CMOX passive rewritable crosspoint memory array has been postponed until 2014-2015.

In May 2009, the then Unity CEO, ex-Micron exec Daniel Rinerson, told me: “We see ourselves in the two year horizon for production volumes of our first product, a 64 Gigabit storage class memory.”

Last night, the current Unity CEO, David Eggleston, told me: “Commercialisation is for the 2014-15 timeframe.”

The plusses for CMOX is that it can be scaled “below 5nm”, though the smallest it has been scaled to is 30nm, and that a 1Tbit part could be made on a 45nm process using 32 memory layers.

Eggleston pointed out that there will be a cost advantage of using trailing edge processes in competition with companies using leading edge processes based on EUV and double patterning.

Eggleston said that a 1Tbit part will be a leading edge non-volatile memory in 2015 because he expects the NAND people to slow down as they transition to vertical structures. The NAND people are already on 64Gbit.

CMOX development is being done jointly by Unity and Micron with each company paying its own cost bill.

Asked if he had enough money to last out until 2015, Eggleston stated: “Yes, Unity has adequate backing from our funders (3 VC’s, Seagate, and Micron) to move the technology forward.”