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Recently, FeFET startup FMC received more than $20 million in funding from companies including Merck, SK Hynix, IMEC, Robert Bosch and Tokyo Electron, as well as existing investor eCapital. Here, we interviewed the company's CEO Ali Pourkeramati to hear his views on the future development of the new storage FeFET.
Pourkeramati began by praising the properties of hafnium oxide as a ferroelectric material, which also happens to be widely used in foundries as an insulating layer in modern ICs. He claimed that ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs) are a natural replacement for embedded flash memory, which has been difficult to scale beyond 28nm.
Pourkeramati noted that unlike embedded flash, FeFET endurance is high at 10^11 cycles and is expected to approach MRAM at 10^15 cycles, with switching speeds of less than 1ns and switching energies of less than 1fJ/bit.
FeFETs work by using nonvolatile ferroelectric properties to shift the transistor threshold voltage. Source: FMC.
He noted that the basic switching speed of FeFETs is high, but in an array it really depends on the loading of the word lines and bit lines. “We have a 32Mbit memory macro that’s about 10ns. If you want to read faster, you go smaller and more spread out, so it makes design sense,” Pourkeramati said.
“It’s a logic-friendly technology that requires two or three noncritical layers. For logic and foundries, it’s heaven,” Pourkeramati added.
Along with their superior high-temperature stability, scalability and familiarity of the materials, FeFETs seemed like an easy win.
However, FMC needs to improve one metric. On its measured and published characterization chart for FE-HfO2, the data retention time is 1000 hours at 125°C. But they expect to be able to maintain it for 10 years at 175°C, but this obviously still requires a lot of work.
As an improvement over high-k dielectrics, ferroelectrics are also suitable for wrap-around gate and nanosheet or nanoribbon transistors. Source: FMC.
Another counterargument is that leading foundries have already adopted MRAM (or phase-change memory in the case of STMicroelectronics) for embedded memory at 28nm and below, so competition with embedded flash is not as intense. “MRAM requires additional materials. Ferroelectric memory does not require special materials and scales with logic, so we can use FinFETs,” Pourkeramati said. MRAM is also susceptible to magnetic fields.
Pourkeramati stressed that ferroelectric memory could address both embedded nonvolatile memory for cache and standalone chips for storage-class memory. FMC has also done some preliminary work on the memory in a 3D stacked form factor. “We can scale to n layers,” Pourkeramati said. It could be used in neuromorphic applications. “We’ve created IP [intellectual property] for all the applications.”
Business Model Discussion
FMC's business model is to license intellectual property and collect patent royalties on a per-chip basis. To do this, the company divides its products into three tiers. One is process-related IP, such as chemical formulas; the second is transistor device-level IP; and the third tier of IP is design or circuit-based. "We license these various IP pools to foundries, fabless chip companies, and IDMs (integrated device manufacturers)," he said.
Roadmap for the introduction of FeFET technology. Source: FMC
Pourkeramati said the first silicon for consumer applications will arrive in 2023 using a 28nm planar CMOS process. After that, there will be a move to 22nm FinFET and/or FDSOI, with other areas appearing in the following years.
FMC’s roadmap seems a bit conservative, considering that it was founded in 2016 and it’s now 2020. “These things take time; time to develop and time to market,” Pourkeramati said. “We think this is reasonable and acceptable. If you want to develop on FinFET, work with us to get through the nodes as quickly as possible.”
It is worth noting that ferroelectric memory has become a hot topic in academia, and many large semiconductor companies are discussing the technology. If FMC is doing pioneering work on memory with hafnium oxide and zirconium-doped hafnium oxide, is it possible that others will benefit?
Pourkeramati declined to say whether FMC's patent position covers hafnium and zirconium.
This brings us back to why Pourkeramati turns down or defers some investments. There is a well-known adage in startup circles that it is best to take venture capital when you don’t need it. Because when you do need it, it won’t be available.
Pourkeramati, who previously worked in venture capital as a managing partner at Impact Capital Partners Inc. before joining FMC in 2019, offered a counter-argument, arguing that FMC will be able to raise more money at a higher valuation in the future.
Other companies wanted to invest in FMC. Likewise, foundries wanted to invest in FMC, but Pourkeramati said he was concerned that being closely tied to any one foundry might inhibit others from using the technology, so the company declined.
There will undoubtedly be more investment opportunities for these investors and others as FMC aspires to enter multiple sectors simultaneously and compete for the long haul, but FMC will need to continue to make progress to replace deployed MRAM.
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