Rambus, GigaDevice form ReRAM joint venture
The company is a joint venture between intellectual property developer Rambus Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), fabless chip company GigaDevice Semiconductor (Beijing) Inc. and multiple venture capital companies. VC companies include THG Ventures, West Summit Capital, Walden International and Zhisland Capital.
The value of the investment was not disclosed but the company is expected to make ReRAM for use in embedded and IoT applications. GigaDevice is a fabless chip company that uses foundries to manufacture non-volatile memory and 32bit microcontrollers.
The Rambus ReRAM technology, previously known as CMOx has a heritage that goes back to Rambus’s acquisition of Unity Semiconductor Corp. for $35 million in February 2012. Unity has been working on the technology for a decade, but failed to bring the technology to market. Unity had claimed to have developed a passive rewritable cross-point memory array based on conductive metal oxide. This would provide similarities to filament-based metal migration technologies such as those developed by Adesto Technologies Corp. and Crossbar Inc.
Despite many attempts few companies have been able to bring ReRAM technology to market. Intel has introduced solid-state drives based on its 3D X-point technology, which is thought to be based on a form of resistive RAM known as phase-change memory.
“Rambus has invested in RRAM technology for several years, and this joint venture is a natural way of continuing to develop this technology for the embedded market,” said Ron Black, CEO of Rambus. “By working together, Rambus and GigaDevice will enable this joint venture to provide innovative memory solutions for the next wave of state-of-the-art mobile devices.”
Yiming Zhu, CEO of GigaDevice, commented: “This strategic investment is aimed at delivering emerging memory solutions for our family of GD32 microcontrollers and other future embedded products in applications such as the Internet of Things.”
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