Low-Power Apps, Foundries Eye Emerging Memories

Despite opportunities, higher densities remain a challenge for most emerging memories.

By Gary Hilson, EETimes (December 19, 2022)

Emerging memories are entering a new phase, but without a high-profile phase-change memory (PCM) that was responsible for the segment’s growth in previous years.

Intel announced it was sunsetting Optane, its PCM-based 3D XPoint technology, just as analysts Thomas Coughlin and Jim Handy were wrapping their annual report, which meant some last-minute revisions to “Emerging Memories Enter Next Phase.”

“Optane was on its way out and we still had a big Optane part in the report,” Handy told EE Times in an interview.

Without Optane, the thrust of the annual joint report from Coughlin Associates and Handy’s Objective Analysis is that the next phase for emerging memories is the major foundries — including Samsung, TSMC, and GlobalFoundries — shipping production parts that have either resistive random-access memory (ReRAM) or magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) in them.

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