Market:

Great digital applications are born from a marriage of software and hardware. While software has improved at a rapid pace over the past two decades, hardware has not matched the quick growth of applications that require data-intensive computing, such as machine intelligence and high-speed networking. The limited availability of fast on-chip memory is an impediment to growth in these areas. More than 50% of the area (and cost) of the typical SoC is embedded SRAM, conservatively a market of over $40B. We reduce the cost of this SRAM, while matching its performance and reducing its power dissipation.

Technology:

Inston provides a new memory solution (MeRAM), which replaces existing on-chip memory hardware by introducing a novel material and device architecture that is compatible with existing manufacturing capabilities. Compared to existing memory hardware (embedded SRAM), MeRAM:

• Reduces cost by 5x by increasing on-chip storage capacity.
• Dramatically increases the performance of computing.
• Reduces power consumption by nonvolatility and increased integration.

Advantages:

• Speed of SRAM
• Density of DRAM
• Compatible with CMOS logic process
• Unlimited endurance

Development Stage:

• Advanced prototype

Select Patents:

• US Patent 8,841,739 “Systems and methods for implementing magnetoelectric junctions”
• US Patent 8,988,923 “Nonvolatile magneto-electric random access memory circuit with burst writing and back-to-back reads”
• US Patent 8,917,562 “Body voltage sensing based short pulse reading circuit”
• US Patent 9,036,407 “Voltage-controlled magnetic memory element with canted magnetization”
• US Patent 9,047,950 “Read-disturbance-free nonvolatile content addressable memory (CAM)”

Select Publications:

• The computer chip that never forgets | IEEE Spectrum
• Array-Level Analysis of Magneto-Electric Random-Access Memory for High-Performance Embedded Applications | IEEE Magnetics Letters

Graduated in 2018

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