AMD obtains license on Z-RAM Gen2

Innovative Silicon, the developer of Z-RAM high density memory, today announced availability of its second generation Z-RAM technology, named Z-RAM Gen2, which delivers significant performance improvements with greatly reduced power consumption. Simultaneously, the company is announcing that AMD has contracted to purchase a license for Z-RAM Gen2, having contracted to purchase a license to the previous generation technology in December of last year.

Z-RAM technologies achieve impressive density and performance by using a single transistor as a memory bitcell, which is made possible by using SOI (silicon-on-insulator) wafers. Z-RAM Gen2 stores significantly more charge in the memory bitcell. The additional charge provides an order-of-magnitude improvement in both cell margin—the difference between a “1” and a “0”—and in data retention time. The higher margin also provides much faster data read and write times, yet reduces power consumption significantly. As a result, Z-RAM Gen2 significantly broadens the range of applications that can take advantage of Z-RAM’s density to both high-performance applications requiring greater than 1GHz operation (when pipelined), and low-power applications that require long-battery life.

Specs: 

• Ultra-high density: greater than 5Mbits per mm2 at 65nm, and greater than 10Mbits per mm2 at 45nm (1.4x – 2x denser than eDRAM and 5x-6x denser than SRAM)
• High performance random array access: greater than 400MHz (when optimized for performance)
• Very low active power consumption: under 10µW/MHz (when optimized for low-power)

Z-RAM Gen2 technology has been fabricated and validated as a complete memory at 90nm, and the bitcell has been validated on an additional five fabrication processes. Test chips are currently in fabrication at both the 65nm and 45nm process nodes. The company has demonstrated bitcell operation on smaller geometries and on the emerging multi-gate/FinFET devices and anticipates no difficulty in scaling to sub45nm process technologies.

It is as of yet unknown what AMD will use the Z-RAM technology for, but it's not impossible that we'll see Z-RAM used as cache memory in upcoming CPU's.

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