April 21, 2006 – Taiwanese fabless IC design house Solid State System Co. has received pilot devices of a new type of SONOS dielectric storage memory from UMC.
The 256Mbit OTP/MTP memory devices, based on 0.18-micron process technologies, involve an innovative method in the program current instead of a hot electron method used by conventional SONOS, to address shrinking channel lengths occurring during scaling.
The companies plan to collaborate on developing a new type of SONOS memory cell, as well as work on reducing manufacturing costs.
SONOS memory technology is seen as an alternative to NAND type flash, offering equivalent program/erase performance and reliability, small cell size, lower voltage operation, and relatively simple manufacturability. It also can be incorporated into generic logic platforms.