FMC – The Ferroelectric Memory Company solves one of the most important hardware challenges in the age of the Internet-of-Things. Fabless companies as well as semiconductor manufacturers are nowadays looking for embedded nonvolatile memory solutions (eNVM) that enable products like microcontrollers (MCU) to follow Moore’s law. However, legacy eNVM solutions like eFlash cannot provide cost-effective solutions that are so in need of the age of IoT.

FMC commercializes a disruptive material innovation that will solve this problem for current and future technology nodes, i.e. eNVM based on ferroelectric hafnium oxide (FE-HfO2). The unexpected physical effect of ferroelectricity in HfO2 allows for the transformation of classical high-k metal-gate (HKMG) transistors into nonvolatile ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFET). In this way, MCUs can easily be scaled from e.g. 65 nm down to 28 nm and beyond enabling tremendous advantages for the overall system: SoC cost reduction of around 80%, per bit, write energy reduction by a factor of 1000, and an overall performance gain of the system of around 70% due to the transition to advanced process nodes.