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Startup Touts Non-Volatile Memory for Logic Process [LONDON — EE Times has spotted another fabless chip company startup that is working on non-volatile memory in both discrete and embedded forms]

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Startup Touts Non-Volatile Memory for Logic Process
Peter Clarke
6/28/2013 01:20 PM EDT

LONDON — EE Times has spotted another fabless chip company startup that is working on non-volatile memory in both discrete and embedded forms.

Rangduru Inc., of San Jose, Calif., was founded in February 2011 by Euipil Kwon, who serves as CEO and had previously been a senior design engineer at a number of Silicon Valley companies, most recently at Mosys Inc. in Santa Clara.

Rangduru is focused on the development of a high-density, one-time programmable, non-volatile memory (NVM) chip, and embedded NVM intellectual property that is logic process compatible. The company says it is also working on terabit-range NVM that scales beyond NAND flash.

The embedded solution is aimed at system-chips for use in set-top boxes, microcontrollers, and DSPs, at memory capacities of up to 256 Mbits. The standalone memory is being prepared for use in one-time programmable (OTP) cards, USB memory, and solid-state drives, the company said.

On Rangduru’s website, the company claims its technology is radiation hard and has a wide operating temperature range. It also claims that its DX OTP memory cell is smaller than a NOR flash cell and a two-transistor OTP memory cell.

In email correspondence with EE Times, Kwon declined to identify the nature of the technology, but said that it requires no extra materials beyond logic processes, thereby likely ruling out phase-change memory. He said that one additional mask is required to define memory arrays within the logic process.

The company is developing the technology using third-party manufacturing facilities in the US on a 180 nm CMOS logic process and aims to port the technology to popular CMOS logic processes on nodes from 180 nm to 28 nm and beyond, Kwon told us.

He said his company has not received any venture capital so far, but has been funded with seed capital from business angels and has a strategic customer that wants to use the Rangduru memory.

And what about the name — Rangduru? Kown says it is derived from Korean and means something like “Everything is consistently good.”

Reference: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1119280