ReRAM startup in reverse takeover for funds
Radar Iron is traded on the Australian Stock Exchange and one of the terms of the deal is that Radar Iron will change its name to Weebit Nano Ltd. once the takeover is completed. The deal also includes the raising of A$5 million (about $3.8 million) and is expected to close early in 1Q16 with Radar Iron relisting on the ASX on April 13 with a new ticker name Weebit.
Weebit, founded in 2014, has an R&D agreement with Rice University (Houston, Texas) and has licensed 7 patents on the silicon oxide memory technology being researched there by Professor James Tour.
According to a statement issued by Radar Iron in November 2015, Weebit will be able to show a commercially viable product within 18 months, in other words by mid-2017. In addition, iDavid (Dadi) Perlmutter, a former general manager of the Intel Architecture Group and CEO candidate at Intel, has joined the Radar Iron board of directors.
Professor Tour is well known in the semiconductor materials research sector and has developed multiple memory systems. However, the ability to form a variable resistance memory in nanoporous silicon dioxide has the advantage that it uses the most commonplace insulator material used in integrated circuit manufacturing. Professor Tour has been retained as Chief Scientific Advisor to Weebit Nano.
Professor Tour’s work in silicon dioxide dates back to before 2010 when the possibility of forming conductive filaments across insulating silicon dioxide was shown in Tour’s lab (see Rice’s silicon memristor aims to beat HP). That work was enhanced in 2014 when it was shown that nanoporous silicon dioxide reduced the forming voltage to less than two volts and eliminated the need for additional material layers to create a “device edge”
Weebit is pitching the technology as a flash memory “killer” that will have the ability to outperform the incumbent non-volatile memory and scale beyond it in terms of physical dimensions.
Weebit said it has demonstrated a working SiOx ReRAM that outperforms flash memory in all key parameters; is 1,000 times faster to read and write, higher reliability and lower power consumption with memory cells at one-tenth the size of flash.
The applications for Weebit’s memory are as broad as for flash memory, which is approximately a $37 billion annual market. They include smartphones and tablet computers, automotive, industrial and medical applications, wearables and the Internet of Things. In cloud data centers storage is implemented in solid-state flash drives (SSDs) and Weebit expects the flash memory to be replaced by ReRAM.
In addition, the SiOx memory has demonstrated a degree of radiation hardness. In 2012, Rice University sent SiOx memory chips to the International Space Station for testing. The memories survived two years in space under exposure to radioactive solar and cosmic rays with zero deterioration or loss of performance.
Weebit Nano is led by CEO Yossi Keret and includes Amir Regev, vice president of engineering, who has twenty years’ experience in the semiconductor industry mainly in the flash memory sector. Prior to Weebit, Regev served as a senior engineer ar Intel, SanDisk, Micron and Marvel. As a senior device engineer Regev helped develop 45nm NOR flash memory technology.
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Rice’s silicon memristor aims to beat HP
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