(Image: RAAAM)
By Peter Clarke
What’s at stake:
An Israeli-Swiss startup called RAAAM has gone back to the drawing board to design a CMOS-compatible memory that sits between SRAM and DRAM and that could offer a cost advantage for numerous applications, including artificial intelligence. If RAAAM can persuade a few foundries and fabless companies to adopt its approach, it could become an industry-changer.
RAAAM Memory Technologies Ltd., headquartered in Pekah Tikva, Israel, and with an R&D base in Lausanne, Switzerland, is a 2021 startup that claims to have developed a better way to do embedded memory. The firm’s technology is called Gain-Cell RAM or GCRAM.
RAAAM claims it can achieve single-cycle SRAM read and write performance while providing up to a 50 percent area reduction and up to 10x power reduction compared with high-density SRAM. And GCRAM is fully compatible with standard CMOS fabrication flows, requiring no additional process steps.