There is definitely a lot of work going on all over the world on finding replacement technologies for the current crop of memory technologies, which will scale better and of course cost less to manufacture. So it is nice when an article is written that gives a nice little summary for some of these technologies on their target applications. Such is the case with a piece written by Motoyuki Oishi for Nikkei Electronics Asia, titled "Successor to Post Flash Memory Approaching Volume Production." The article first examines CMOx technology from Unity Semiconductor, a startup developing transistor-less non-volatile memory. We first covered Unity Semiconductor back in June of last year and discussed the CMOx technology in some detail as well. A couple new facts that emerge from Motoyuki’s article are that Unity plans to bring a 256Gbit product to market sometime in 2012, and that the expected chip area per-Gbit will be 0.78mm^2 in 45nm technology. With this superb bit density Unity expects to be very cost competitive with NAND flash memory, and also significantly faster when it comes to access times - eventually it seem that the company is aiming at replacing DRAM as well.

The article also covers Toshiba's spin-injection MRAM which utilizes perpendicular magnetization and is aimed at replacing DRAM technology. The current 64Mbit prototype implemented in 65nm technology and presented by Toshiba at ISSCC is capable of operating at 1.2V with a cycle time of 30ns in typical conditions. Finally, the article discusses Numonyx Inc., of Switzerland, which in conjunction with Intel is developing Phase-Change Memory (PCM) that is intended as a replacement for NOR based flash memory. In particular these companies have been working on a Phase Change Memory and Switch (PCMS) architecture which just like CMOx technology intends to explore 3D stacking to increase density and decrease the cost per-bit. Anyhow, there is a lot more information in Motoyuki’s article as well as many interesting illustrations that he collected from different presentations and papers, so if future memory technology is of interest to you, it would serve you well to check it out.

With the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) going on in Silicon Valley, it seems that Freescale Semiconductor has been in the news continuously over the last few days. First, there was Bolaji Ojo’s analysis about Freescale moving closer to an IPO. Bolaji based his analysis on Freescale’s sales growth, higher design wins, an improved dept position, and a vibrant equity market, and expects the company to file for an IPO later this year or at the very latest at the beginning of 2011. Then the company also revealed ultra low-current MCUs for the medical devices market while at the same time gunning for the DSP market and incumbent heavyweight Texas Instruments (TI). If this weren’t enough already, Freescale also announced strategic partnership agreements with several software companies including Enea, Green Hills Software, and Mentor Graphics to work on enablement solutions for the QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore processors.

The last one was particularly interesting since I did get a chance to talk briefly to Raja Tabet, the VP of Software and Enablement at Freescale, regarding the announcement. Due to my poor organizational skills and the inability to distinguish between Central and Eastern Time, sorry Raja, I did not have anything handy to jot down direct quotes, but I will do my best to paraphrase whatever I do remember. The first thing that is apparent is that Freescale is trying to create an open software ecosystem that will enable customers to have a choice when it comes to deeply optimized software stacks for their products. While each one of the aforementioned companies has particular fields of expertise which Freescale intends to leverage, there is one area in which all of them clearly overlap: real-time operating systems (RTOS). Enea has the OES which is a multicore RTOS, as wells as the OESck which is a high-performance DSP RTOS. Green Hills Software has developed the Integrity RTOS which according to the company is the only commercial operating system that has attained EAL6+ High Robustness certification by the NSA-managed NIAP lab. Finally, Mentor Graphics has the Nucleus RTOS which is optimized for resource-constrained devices. In short, customer will soon have an extended set of OS choices from which to pick when developing with Freescale devices.

With all this OS talk, I could not resist asking Raja what his take was on Android. He was quick to point out that the Android platform was indeed an important strategic objective, and that the Mentor Graphics strategic agreement fit well with that objective. In 2009 Mentor Graphics acquired Linux/Android specialist Embedded Alley at which point Mentor Graphics already pointed out that it was planning to port Android to Freescale PowerPC-based QorIQ and PowerQUICC processors. Raja was also quick to point out on several occasions that Freescale has extensive internal software capability and has a dedicated team of over 1000 software engineers, partially due to many acquisitions the company made over the years starting with Metrowerks back in 1999. The new strategic partnerships will enable Freescale to share a lot of this internal software IP with the partners as well, fostering an open two-way relationship that should benefit both sides.

So, after all this, where does this leave Freescale? Well, certainly the media and the company management seem pretty enthusiastic. Partnerships with other companies of course help out as well showing that other companies are will to invest and work with Freescale. With NXP Semiconductor filing for IPO earlier this year, an IPO exit seems certainly a possibility. Could another company be interested in acquiring Freescale? Well, with a long term debt of about $7.4 billion that seems somewhat unlikely. But who knows, Apple with its recent semiconductor acquisition appetite, particularly Austin based Intrinsity comes to mind and the recent ARM rumors, and a $40 billion war chest, could certainly stomach it - either way, things are likely to remain interesting for Freescale over the course of this year. The only tip I would give Freescale management is to channel some of this positive energy and excitement to their employees. Being Austin based I run into a lot of these folks, and unlike upper management and the media, they are a little less enthusiastic about the company’s future at the moment.

We first covered Shocking Technologies at the beginning of 2008, when the company raised $4M in venture funding from Hercules Technology Growth Capital. Back then, very little information was available regarding what the company was pursuing, other than that it had something to do with conductive dielectrics. As it turns out, our guess that that company might be looking into electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection was right on. The conductive dielectric has been rebranded into a Voltage Switchable Dielectric (VSD) material, which the company defines as a “polymer nano-composite that behaves like an insulator (dielectric) during normal circuit operation and becomes conductive when the voltage across the VSD material increases beyond a predefined threshold voltage. The VSD material becomes an insulator again after the voltage drops below the threshold voltage.” The figure below shows the embedding of the VSD material such that it is in contact with the ground plane in the design.

Since the VSD material is embedded throughout the substrate, regardless where the high static charge enters and a high voltage pulse occurs, the excess current is shunt to ground within a nanosecond, according to Shocking Technologies. The VSD material can be integrated within a printed circuit board (PCB) to offer board level protection, or as mentioned beforehand, into the substrate in order to provide package level protection. Cell phone, portable electronics, memory device, and semiconductor companies have expressed interest in the technology recently according to company. Viking Modular Solutions introduced a CF card just the other week featuring VSD technology and it seems the investor community has taken notice as well, allowing Shocking Technologies to raise $13.2M in Series-B funding at the beginning of this month. With money in hand the company intends to expand rapidly, increasing its staff by 33% over the next few months and by over 50% over the course of a year - so if you’re looking for a job with an exciting startup now would be the time to apply.