Rambus, a technology licensing company that acquires third-party companies and intellectual property in order to demand royalties from actual manufacturers of products, it has acquired privately-held Unity Semiconductor, an innovative memory technology company for an aggregate of $35 million in cash. As a result of the acquisition, Rambus will be able to license technologies related to ReRAM and memristors.

“At Rambus, we are creating disruptive technologies to enable future electronic products. With the addition of Unity, we can develop non-volatile memory solutions that will advance semiconductor scaling beyond the limits of today’s NAND technology. This will enable new memory architectures that help meet ever-increasing consumer demands,” ,” said Sharon Holt, senior vice president and general manager of the semiconductor business group at Rambus.

Unity has developed a novel solid state memory technology intended to replace NAND in the growing non-volatile memory market. With nine years of development history, Unity’s memory technology, CMOx, has been designed to accelerate the commercialization of the terabit generation of non-volatile memories. Devices using CMOx cell technology are expected to achieve higher density, faster performance, lower manufacturing costs and greater data reliability than NAND flash.

CMOx is powered by the physics of oxygen vacancy movement, which is entirely different from the physics of electrons that makes NAND work. The memory effect of CMOx is created by moving oxygen ions between two metal oxides under electric field. CMOx resembles memristor.

As part of this acquisition, the Unity team members have joined Rambus to continue developing innovations and solutions for next-generation non-volatile memory. This acquisition will expand the breadth of Rambus’ memory technologies and will open up new markets for licensing and demanding royalties. The boards of directors of both companies have approved the acquisition and it has closed.

“Rambus provides our team the perfect environment to continue the technology development of non-volatile memory cells and architectures. Our comprehensive set of design, process and device solutions will complement Rambus’ existing strong technology portfolio and system capabilities,” said David Eggleston, president and chief executive officer at Unity Semiconductor.

Tags: Rambus, CMOx, ReRAM, Memristor, Unity Semiconductor