Stealthy SunRise is developing 3D ferroelectric RAM
SunRise Memory Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) has revealed that it is developing 3D ferroelectric RAM with an eye to AI applications.
Eli Harari, the co-founder of Sandisk Corp., founded SunRise Memory back in 2016 after retiring from Sandisk in 2010, as revealed by eeNews Europe in February 2022. He continues to serve SunRise as CEO.
For a number of years the scaling of DRAM density and power dissipation have struggled to keep pace with the demands imposed by massive databases and large language models in AI. This is the so-called ‘Memory Wall’.
At present AI applications use high-bandwidth memory (HBM) format DRAMs made from multiple die, produced in conventional fab design flows. The die are stacked in a packaging process that happens after wafer thinning in a complex and therefore expensive process.
SunRise is betting that 3D ferroelectric RAM can provide a high capacity, high bandwidth, low-power alternative. The company has assembled a team of 40 engineers located in the US and Israel and is designing its ferroelectric RAM to be manufacturable in existing high-volume wafer fabs that have mastered 3D process flows, such as 3D NAND fabs.
The company appears to be going after vertically stacked FeFET memory cells targeting a tenfold improvement in density over conventional DRAM die. The chip-level architecture is also looking to manage hundreds of independent memory banks in parallel – optimizing for bandwidth rather then die area and cost – the company states. This will serve to reduce latency and support memory-centric AI inference and training and high-performance compute.
The company has not discussed how soon it could bring 3D ferroelectric RAM to market or which 3D-capable manufacturers could be its partners. The company states in its website that it is about half-way through its development journey.
One of Harari’s co-founders of Sandisk in 1988 was Sanjay Mehrotra, who is now CEO of DRAM and flash memory chip maker Micron Technology Inc. (Boise, Idaho).
SunRise reportedly raised $74.8 million in a Series C round of finance in October 2019. Its lead investors are Seagate, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron Ltd. The company has 80 registered patents with more pending.
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