LONDON, UK: Innovative Silicon Incorporated, a pioneer in floating-body memory, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the United States, has announced that it has adapted its technology for operation at less than one volt so that it does not need a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate. 

In a statement, the privately owned company said that a test chip produced at Hynix Semiconductor Incorporated using 54-nm design rules has demonstrated that the Z-RAM technology is a contender as the power DRAM replacement technology with the lowest cost and lowest power.

Innovative Silicon, set up in 2002, said it is not giving out, for the time being, engineering detail of its achievement. 

A paper jointly written by Innovative Silicon and Hynix Semiconductor has been submitted for presentation at the 2010 VLSI Technology Symposium. The paper will divulge more details about the cell operating voltages of the Z-RAM technology, Innovative Silicon said.

According to the company, implementing floating-body RAM on bulk silicon avoids the need for costly silicon on insulator (SOI) substrates. The Z-RAM, Innovative Silicon added, is set to cost lower than traditional DRAM at sub-40-nm production nodes as well as meet the double data rate performance requirements.

Mark-Eric Jones, president and CEO of Innovative Silicon, said in the statement that though conventional DRAM has been the low cost, random-access memory technology for about 40 years now, the memory industry is on the verge of switching to the capacitor-free Z-RAM technology.