United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) yesterday announced the delivery of a new SONOS (Silicon Oxide Nitride Oxide Silicon) memory to Taiwan-based IC-design house Solid State System. This new memory adopts advanced SONOS dielectric storage technology, which enhances program speed as compared to conventional SONOS cells and conventional NAND type flash, UMC said.
UMC claims that it was able to deliver the 0.18-micron memory cell during its first cut, followed by completion of the pilot run for a 256Mbit one-time programmable/multi-time programmable (OTP/MTP) memory product.
Joe Ko, vice president of the Specialty Technology Division at UMC, said, "UMC has been working on flash technology for many years, for several customers' flash products, including commodity flash as well as embedded flash/EEPROM devices. This latest success with Solid State System for the delivery of their SONOS product reaffirms UMC's solid technology foundation and knowledge base in the area of flash technology."
There has been growing interest in SONOS technology in recent years because of its small cell size, lower voltage operation and simple manufacturability, as compared to conventional types of flash technology such as NAND.




