Macronix Plans Low-Cost 3D NAND
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Macronix Plans Low-Cost 3D NAND

Miin Wu believes that he can cut 3D NAND prices by a third. The founder of Macronix is raising funds for a three-year effort that is both ambitious and pragmatic.The NOR and ROM maker seeks funds to expand by a little more than 10% of its current capacity of about 400,000 12-inch equivalent wafers/month. An extra 50,000 wafers/month will initially be in traditional 3D NAND. Once it establishes a customer base, it will ramp a novel architecture that it claims sports 30% lower cost per bit.If all goes well, the company aims to release its first chips in in a little more than two years. Miin Wu was in Silicon Valley recently to discuss with equipment makers details of key etch tools needed to make competitive 3D NAND parts.“Right now, all my R&D money is spent on 3D NAND,” said Miin Wu, noting that he expects to make his own controllers, too. “If I can build a 50,000-wafer capacity, I can compete and make money, but for our full ROI, we need multiples of that, so we will need to expand.”Macronix is not the only wannabe in the burgeoning market for 3D NAND. China’s Yangtze Memory Technology Co. aims to deliver 256-Gbit chips late next year supporting data rates up to 3.0 Gbits/s using a proprietary Xstacking technology. YMTC was founded in 2016 with a whopping $24 billion in funding, leveraging the 12-inch fabs of China’s XMC in Wuhan.YMTC plans to be in volume production of conventional 32-layer NAND chips by October. If all goes well, in a little more than a year, it could be producing chips at a rate of 100,000 wafers/month in the first phase of a new fab with a second phase planned to triple capacity, fueling plans to take 10% to 20% of the worldwide NAND market.It’s a big, risky bet to gain a position in a highly competitive field. Just last month, SK Hynix announced that it will sample before the end of the year a 512-Gbit version of its 96-layer chips and a Tbit version before June. Larger rivals Samsung and Toshiba are already shipping similar parts today. The top vendors, which include Micron, are said to be well on their way to cracking the 100-layer level with plans extending to hundreds of levels.Despite the heady competition, Macronix “has a good opportunity to focus on lower-density parts that major vendors obsolete — in a shortage, that’s a great place to be,” said analyst Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, who estimates that the flash market will hit $58 billion this year, up 23% over 2017.That’s the kind of position in trailing-edge memories that Macronix has traditionally pursued. This time around, however, Miin Wu said that he aims to deliver 3D NAND parts at the same density but lower costs as rivals.Handy said that the goal would challenge the Taiwan company’s business model that, to date, has focused more on high-mix, low-volume products. Success will also depend on the state of NAND ASPs, which have been declining from 27 cents/GByte to 20 cents/GB, noted Handy.“I believe that memory can be the other strength of Taiwan,” said Miin Wu, who founded Macronix in 1989, when TSMC was just two years old.Today, TSMC is producing state-of-the-art SoCs at 7 nm, while Macronix is best-known as a leader in older memory products such as NOR flash and ROMs made in 90- and 35-nm nodes. That said, Macronix has its share of innovations with more than 7,600 patents, said Miin Wu, who helped design the EEPROM while at Intel in the 1970s.Macronix plans a number of stops along the way to its 3D NAND dreams. It plans to sample 4-GByte eMMC NAND by the end of the year. It’s also driving NOR down to 1.2 V for low-power IoT chips with standby power measured in nanoamps.Nintendo remains its largest customer overall. In China, Huawei is its largest customer and likely one of the first to use its eMMC chips in products such as base stations.Macronix described its Single-Gate Vertical Channel architecture for 3D NAND at IEDM. Click to enlarge. (Source: Macronix)
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Release time：2018-09-19 00:00 reading：1129 Continue reading>>
Imagination looks to add low-cost AI capabilities on edge devices
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Imagination looks to add low-cost AI capabilities on edge devices

Imagination Technologies has unveiled two neural network cores, the AX2185 and AX2145, that have been designed to enable high-performance computation of neural networks at very low power consumption in a minimal silicon area.                                           The cores are based on Imagination’s neural network accelerator (NNA) architecture, PowerVR Series2NX, which, according to the company, will help to bring ‘smartness’ from the cloud into edge devices, enabling greater efficiency and real-time responsiveness.The Series2NX AX2185 targets the high-end smartphone, smart surveillance, and automotive markets, where neural network acceleration has a significant impact in areas such as image categorisation and driver assistance systems. Featuring eight full-width compute engines the AX2185 provides 2,048 MACs/clock (4.1 Tera Operations Per Second), which according to Imagination, represents the highest performance per mm2 in the market.Optimised for cost-sensitive devices, the AX2145 targets mid-range smartphone, DTV/set-top box, smart camera and consumer security markets, which are increasingly adopting neural network acceleration for various tasks such as image management and vision-based applications.The streamlined architecture delivers performance-efficient neural network inferencing for ultra-low bandwidth systems, making it a cost-effective solution for OEMs and ODMs working with limited silicon area budgets.Both cores fully support the Android Neural Networks API (NNAPI), used by developers to bring neural network capabilities to Android-based mobile devices. The PowerVR Series2NX architecture was designed from the ground-up to provide hardware acceleration for efficient neural network inference in mobile and embedded platforms. Its flexible bit-depth support on a per-layer basis for weights and data means PowerVR Series2NX can maintain high inference accuracy while reducing bandwidth/power requirements. It is, currently, the only solution supporting bit-depths from 16-bit to 4-bit, resulting in higher performance at lower bandwidth and power.Imagination is also providing a comprehensive set of tools to streamline AI application development and deployment and, debugging and analysis. Machine learning frameworks are supported using our Network Developer Kit (NDK).Russell James, vice president, Vision and AI, PowerVR, Imagination Technologies, said: “AI is transforming industries and neural networks are at the centre of this, creating exciting new use cases that are changing lives. The processing for this has predominantly taken place in the cloud, but with latency issues, privacy concerns and increasing demands on scalability, edge AI processing is becoming a necessity.”The AX2185 core has already been delivered to lead customers and both cores are available for licensing now.
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Release time：2018-06-11 00:00 reading：1134 Continue reading>>
<span style='color:red'>Low-cost</span> Lifetime Boost for Lithium Batteries
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Low-cost Lifetime Boost for Lithium Batteries

　　Want to boost your lithium-ion battery’s lifetime without setting the house on fire? Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, Hsinchu) is proposing a quick-fix solution: a composite paste that OEMs can apply to battery electrodes. ITRI claims, with the test data to support it, that its ChemSEI-Linker paste increases Li-ion batteries’ lifetime up to 70%. ITRI also says ChemSEI-Linker is a green technology because it enables easier recycling of Li-ion cells at the end of their extended lifetimes.　　ITRI engineered the material after analyzing why the electrodes always seem to be the weak link that causes Li-ion batteries to fail in the field. (The researchers looked at performance degradation, not the failures that result in fires or explosions; those have been traced to dendrites).　　After surveying the literature and testing the most likely culprits in its labs, ITRI concluded that the primary cause of full-lifetime failure is the buildup of a predatory solid-electrolyte interface (SEI) layer starting with the very first recharge cycle. The buildup layer thickens over the lifetime of the battery, gradually degrading its performance until it works so poorly as to need replacement.　　ITRI says ChemSEI-Linker inhibits that natural accumulation by depositing its own, nanoscale-thick SEI layer. The deposited SEI repels further buildup during recharging, much as depositing a single monolayer of oxidation on aluminum prevents more from accumulating and thereby makes the aluminum rust-free.　　“Normal SEI formation is similar to the growing of tree rings. During each charging cycle, an irreversible electrochemical decomposition of the organic electrolyte happens at the electrode surface. This kind of decomposition deposits a layer with an increasingly complex composition on the surface of the active material, thus the name: solid-electrolyte interphase,” Jing-Pin Pan, chief technology officer of ITRI’s Material and Chemical Research Laboratories, told EE Times in an exclusive interview in advance of its Nov. 9 announcement. “The performance degradation results from the continuous SEI formation. As the SEI grows thicker, transportation of the lithium ion from the electrolyte to the active material becomes more difficult. Further, the lithium ion itself tends to be reduced on the SEI surface or intercalated within the SEI layer, leading to the loss of free lithium. Eventually, that loss leads to a positive potential shift of the anode, rendering the battery unusable.”　　To nix this natural process, ITRI’s chemists searched for a methodology that would inhibit the constant thickening of the SEI layers on the anode and found that the intentional deposition of a first layer of SEI inhibits the growth of more layers during recharging. While the process is similar to the growth of a single oxidation layer on aluminum to prevent rusting, ITRI’s SEI formulation is many orders of magnitude more complex. As Pan described it, “ChemSEI-Linker is an integrated, multifunctional, unique combinational structure, which in situ combines organic hyperbranched polymer material with silane-type linkers, electroconductive additives, and conductive metallic-ion inorganic structural materials.”　　The protective film forms on the surface of the active electrode materials as the electrode paste is mixed. In lab testing, ITRI researchers found that the film provided stress buffering and functional protection for the interfaces between the various components (for example, the active electrode materials, electroconductive additives, and binders) of normal electrode paste.　　“The paste can be applied as a two-sided precision coating and baked to manufacture ChemSEI-linker electrodes. SEI film strongly adheres to the active electrode materials. The resultant electrodes have high durability and great stability, and can be assembled into a unique cell. ChemSEI-Linker can also be used as an adhesive to join active electrode particles, electroconductive additives, and binders,” Pan said.　　The material and application process would raise the manufacturing bill of materials for Li-ion cells by 7% to 10%, but that is an acceptable trade-off for the 70% potential extension of the product lifetime, according to ITRI. Pan noted that the coating stays put, virtually intact, throughout the extended lifetime of the battery.　　Lab results　　Beyond collecting test data on the formulation’s performance, ITRI reverse-engineered it to explain how and why the process preserves battery life, allowing higher energy output to be maintained over a longer period, while also enabling safer operation, higher voltage endurance, and a faster charge/discharge cycle.　　“With the ever-increasing desire for higher energy densities, the usual technique for battery manufacturers is to reach the goal by roller compaction. However, the cracks that occur with high-pressure rolling take their toll,” Pan said. “ChemSEI-Linker electrodes improve this adhesion from 85 kgf [kilogram-force] to 220 kgf on the electrode with ChemSEI-Linker, without producing any cracks after the standard folding test. In addition, ChemSEI-Linker forms a tenacious protection layer on the active material particle surfaces, thus effectively preventing the electrolyte from damaging the particles. This reduces the microcrack phenomenon in the primary and secondary particles in the charge/discharge process.”　　In more detail, IRTI’s life cycle testing was conducted with standard 1C charging and 1C discharging at 2.4 to 4.2 volts and 25°C. The results showed that the capacity retention of prismatic cells with ChemSEI-Linker-modified lithium nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) was better than 97% after 995 test cycles. This result showed that ChemSEI-Linker effectively protected the cathodes of NMC prismatic cells and was able to prevent discharge capacity loss, extending the battery’s potential lifetime to more than 3,000 charge/discharge cycles.　　“The service life of NCA [lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxide] batteries with ChemSEI-Linker modification can reach 1,400 cycles (80% capacity retention), giving 70% longer service life than unmodified batteries,” said Pan. “ChemSEI-Linker modification also improves DCIR [direct current internal resistance] relative to unmodified systems, because the increase of DCIR is directly proportional to the increase of SEI on the surface of the anode material. ChemSEI-Linker surface modification effectively protects the NCA cathode material, allowing it to suppress SEI film growth on the NCA surface, thus reducing accumulated resistance and enhancing service life.”　　ITRI is not releasing all the details of the process until ITRI has obtained a U.S. patent, but Pan had this to say about maintaining higher energy over time: “As we know, the high-temperature environment causes battery capacity to fade. The reason is that the elements of active material ionize and dissolve into the electrolyte at high temperature. [At ITRI,] an aging test was conducted at 55°C for 30 days. The results for the change of cell capacity reveals that the capacity recovery ratios of the compared batteries after the aging test were 2% coating, >1% coating, and >0% coating; the corresponding values were 99%, 96%, and 93%, respectively. Moreover, the order for the manganese-ion dissolution quantities of the compared batteries after the aging test was 0% coating, >1% coating, and >2% coating, and the corresponding values were 220, 120, and 90 ppm [parts per million], respectively. These results proved that ChemSEI-Linker can effectively protect the cathodes of MCN/LMO [lithium nickel manganese/lithium manganese oxide] batteries and can prevent manganese-ion dissolution and battery capacity loss.”　　The researchers observed similarly favorable test results for voltage endurance. “With the normal charge- and discharge-cycle voltage range of 4.2 to 2.5 V, both ChemSEI-Linker-modified and unmodified batteries performed similarly within 500 cycles. However, the discharging capacity of a battery with ChemSEI-Linker modification is higher than that of an unmodified battery; hence the discharging range is higher after 500 cycles (for 4.2 to 2.5 V), and the battery capacity is 15% higher,” said Pan.　　Finally, ITRI claims the coating provides higher safety to the user. “Linker modification reduced the accelerating heat rates in the temperature region of the ARC [adiabatic calorimeter] tests,” Pan said. The accelerated heat rates for NCA, NCM, and LCO batteries with ChemSEI-Linker modification were 50, 10, and 0.2 °C/min, respectively, compared with 1,700, 400, and 4°C/min, respectively, for unmodified batteries. Because ChemSEI-Linker modification can control heat, it can prevent thermal runaway and thus makes batteries safer.”　　ChemSEI-Linker is still unavailable in the United States, but ITRI is authorized to license its use for industrial battery cooperation efforts once the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issues a patent.
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Release time：2017-11-13 00:00 reading：1289 Continue reading>>

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