Lucent Technologies Licenses Flash Memory Technology to Winbond

Staff -- Semiconductor International, 12/1/1998

Lucent Technologies (Murray Hill, N.J.) granted Taiwan-based Winbond Electronics Corp. a worldwide license to manufacture a novel flash memory chip that requires 10X less power to program than conventional flash memory chips. Lucent's new technology, known as CHISEL (Channel Initiated Secondary Electron Injection), will allow electronic devices such as cellular phones and laptop computers to operate with smaller and longer lasting batteries.

CHISEL also needs less power during the normal "read" operation of electronic devices, and the amount of power savings will depend on system hardware and applications. While lower power typically means longer read access times in flash memory products, CHISEL reverses that effect, resulting in lower power requirements and faster read-access times. The CHISEL technology, which will use a design process producing features that are 0.35 µm and smaller, was developed by Bell Labs. The smaller features ­ as small as 0.1 µm ­ will be possible because of CHISEL's lower power requirements; for instance, the higher voltages in today's flash memory products would "punch" through the smaller features, resulting in leakage of current. "Lucent's breakthrough will dramatically reduce power consumption and accelerate read-access speeds, which will address two concerns that have limited use of flash memory for storage applications," said Alan Niebel, director of non-volatile memory research at Semico Research Corp.

Besides the licensing agreement, Lucent and Winbond have agreed to jointly develop stand-alone and embedded flash memory products using CHISEL for two years. It is expected that both Lucent and Winbond will offer products that use CHISEL technology. Expected product introduction will be in early 2000.