The University of Tokyo is also said to be participating in this programme along with several other companies and organisations, who are said to be considering investment and technical cooperation, including the National Institute of Chemical Research (Riken), a national research and development corporation, and the semiconductor package substrate company Shinco Electric Industries.
Softbank recently established a new company called ‘Sai Memory’ to develop new semiconductors and, in addition to Intel's technology, the company plans to use patents owned by Tokyo University and others to make prototypes over the next two years with a view to taking them to mass production later.
As part of this project, Cy Memory is responsible for IP (Intellectual Property) management and plans to reduce power consumption compared to HBM by changing the structure of wiring between memories when stacking memory DRAMs on a substrate.
Softbank looks set to invest 3 billion yen in Cy Memory and will become the largest investor. Softbank is also considering a request for funding from the Japanese government.
The new memory developed by Cy Memory will be used in data centre and the project aims to develop a more competitive solution than the current HBM in terms of price as well as power consumption, allowing it to operate AI data centres at high quality and low cost.
While HBM has excellent data storage capacity and transmission speed, there are issues around cost and power consumption and as demand has soared there have been problems with supply – according to SK Hynix, the market leader for HBM, all supplies for the next two years have been sold out.
According to BCG, a US consulting firm, AI-related server shipments are expected to increase six-fold between 2023 and 2027, and DRAM shipments will also increase 21% annually.
Softbank and others are actively developing new memories in part because most of the Japanese companies that produced DRAM have virtually disappeared since the 1980s, and Kioxia, which is separated from Toshiba, only produces NAND flash memory.
The Japanese government is looking to support the semiconductor industry in Japan by investing more than 10 trillion yen in public funds by 2030.
