Weebit Nano extends development partnership with CEA-Leti

Weebit Nano, a developer of next-generation memory technologies, has expanded its ongoing strategic development partnership with CEA-Leti, the French research institute, as it looks to further enhance its ReRAM technologies and support its commercialisation efforts.

The new agreement will look to expand the intellectual property (IP) co-operation between the two companies, leveraging CEA-Leti’s broad investment in memory research for over 10 years and covering the IP jointly developed by Weebit and CEA-Leti.

As part of the agreement, Weebit will incorporate additional IP licensed from CEA-Leti into its ReRAM offerings, further improving its technical parameters such as endurance, retention and robustness.

Weebit said that ithe agreement would help to position the company’s ground-breaking technology at the forefront of the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) industry and broaden its commercialisation opportunities in industries such as automotive which require high-temperature performance.

Commenting Coby Hanoch, CEO of Weebit Nano, said: “Our collaboration with CEA-Leti has been very successful to-date, enabling us to advance development of our industry-leading ReRAM to the point that it is highly competitive and ready for transfer to a production fab.

“CEA-Leti has been developing advanced memory technologies such as ReRAM cells and OTS back-end selectors for more than a decade and has a deep understanding in this domain. We are now further leveraging this know-how, resulting in even more robust and resilient memory arrays for the benefit of our production customers and partners. Our new agreement with CEA-Leti underpins continued research and development – which is essential within the ever-evolving Semiconductor industry – while supporting key commercialisation steps.”

Olivier Faynot, Head of Silicon Components Division at CEA-Leti, added, “Development of reliable and cost-effective resistive memory technology is an important element of CEA-Leti’s advanced non-volatile memory initiatives, and as such, Weebit is a key strategic development partner for us. The ReRAM technology we started to develop and continue developing with Weebit is highly efficient and extremely robust, and is a great fit for various embedded applications, discrete memory chips, and ultimately as a solution for neuromorphic computing. By expanding our relationship with Weebit, we are laying the groundwork for exciting new memory solutions for the industry.”

The integration of CEA-Leti’s additional IP will help to enhance Weebit’s ReRAM technology. Tests have shown an order of magnitude improvement in array-level endurance, and a 2x increase in data retention at the same conditions compared to previous results.

In addition, the technology will make it possible for Weebit to address new high-volume markets such as automotive and smart cards by enabling high-temperature reliability up to 175oC and high-temperature compatibility for wafer level packaging.