UK startup is ‘most innovative’ at Flash Memory Summit

Business news | August 15, 2023

By Peter Clarke

Memory & Data Storage

Quinas Technology Ltd. (Lancaster, England), the startup formed to commercialize UltraRAM memory, has won an accolade at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California.

The company was named the Most Innovative Flash Memory Startup.

Invented by Professor Manus Hayne from the Physics Department at Lancaster University, UltraRAM is based on quantum tunneling of electrons, within a layered compound semiconductor structure that can be manufactured on silicon wafers (see UK team moves UltraRAM to silicon substrate).

It has the ability to both store data for a long time – extrapolated to be more than 1,000 years – exceeding the capabilities in flash, but also to be read and written very quickly and at low energy similar to DRAM with an endurance of more than 10 million cycles. Hence being a dubbed a universal memory.

The universal memory was a ‘holy grail’ of solid-state memory research but has largely been abandoned as a line of research in recent years.

Similar to a compound semiconductor version of flash, UltraRAM exploits the quantum-mechanical effect of resonant tunnelling, replacing the oxide tunnel barrier in flash with a triple-barrier resonant tunnelling (TBRT) structure.

Quinas’ commercial objective is to develop the technology into a product that can out-perform DRAM, the working memory in digital electronics and computing, with the significant added advantage of non-volatility.

The Flash Memory Summit award citation is for “innovations that will change the way flash memory and all other forms of high-performance memory work, and how it is used in products. The recipients of this award will enjoy significant differentiation of their intellectual property and patents from alternative competitive technologies in the memory industry.”