On October 28th, according to a report by technology media sem, former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is supporting a memory startup Nagare Labs through venture capital firm Playground Global in their efforts to develop next-generation storage technology Z2RAM.

The company recently completed a seed round of financing of $5 million (Note from IT: the current exchange rate is approximately 33.405 million RMB) led by Playground Global. The goal is to create a computing memory that combines the speed of SRAM with the density of DRAM, in order to alleviate the "memory wall" bottleneck.

Z2RAM was developed by Nagare Labs, founded by researchers Suman Datta from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Yu Shimeng. It utilizes oxide semiconductor materials and is planned to be directly integrated on top of logic chips through 3D hybrid bonding.

The key selling point of Z2RAM is the use of standard back-end manufacturing processes (BEOL). It is capable of forming multi-layer storage structures with a single exposure without the need for extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), which holds promise for increasing density and reducing manufacturing complexity and costs.

Unlike traditional DRAM devices that rely on capacitors to store charge, Z2RAM uses transistor-based storage cells, which enables non-destructive reading and thus has the potential to reduce access latency. The startup also plans to stack the storage cells vertically, similar to NAND flash memory. The initial implementation is aimed at achieving a target bit density more than 5 times that of SRAM.

However, this technology is still in the laboratory prototype stage. Nagare Labs is seeking research and development manufacturing partners to overcome the production capacity limitations of university cleanrooms; the company plans to launch working Z2RAM memory chip samples within four years and achieve commercial delivery within the next decade.

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