Weebit Nano Report Successful Data Retention Results on Scaled Down 40nm Array

Weebit Nano Ltd. report the successful data retention results on its scaled down 40nm array.

The results achieved indicate that the company’s technology is capable of maintaining stored information for over ten years, which is above the requirement to be commercially viable.

The company previously reported similar data retention results on its 300nm cell size and now, as part of the baseline parameter improvement project it is conducting with Leti, reliability tests have confirmed data retention is not impacted by scaling down the memory size.

Data retention is considered one of the most crucial reliability parameters in the non-volatile memory market. Retention errors are the most dominant failure mechanism, responsible for more than 99% of the NAND (or flash memory) failures after one year in the field ⁽¹⁾. It is also known that data retention poses significant reliability challenges in other emerging memory technologies.

Coby Hanoch, CEO, Weebit Nano, said: “Weebit is conducting extensive and robust testing with our partner, Leti, as we continue to develop and improve the baseline parameters of our SiOx technology. Data retention is an important validation and demonstrates one of the key strengths of our technology. These results are essential to our productisation plans, as many markets require 10 years of retention as a ‘must-have’ feature.“

“We are currently in the process optimisation phase whereby we are making improvements to additional parameters such as endurance, yield and manufacturability. This is an important step a we ready our technology for the productisation stage. Our improvement testing is also providing us with significant know-how, which we will use in the next phase of scaling down to 28nm.“

The data retention test was conducted in CEA/Leti testing facilities by the company’s engineers under various testing conditions, including elevated temperatures for various periods of time to accelerate and age of the devices in order to replicate ten years’ operation in the field. Data analysis and life-time prediction calculations using industry standard metrics have shown that the firm’s ReRAM SiOx arrays did not present any significant degradation with information being detected with no corruption after ten years’ field operation.

In addition, the company’s 40nm devices endured an elevated temperature of 260°C for a period of time that well exceeds the requirements of soldering semiconductor components onto a PCB.

⁽¹⁾ Cai, Yu; Error Patterns in MLC NAND Flash Memory; EDAA 2012