Lancaster University spinout company Quinas Technology Ltd. has been awarded £300,000 from Innovate UK to commercialise the universal computer memory ULTRARAM™.

ULTRARAM™ combines the best properties of DRAM and flash into a single device. It is fast, non-volatile, has high endurance and is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than any other memory technology. It achieves these remarkable properties by harnessing a quantum mechanical process called resonant tunnelling.

The inventor of ULTRARAM is Professor Manus Hayne of the Physics Department at Lancaster University and Chief Scientific Officer at Quinas who said: “This is a significant first step for a newly formed company and has fired the starting gun in the race to commercialise ULTRARAM, but it will be a marathon, not a sprint. We look forward to tackling the challenges that lie ahead.”

The award from the UK’s national innovation agency follows the completion of the intensive and highly competitive ICURe programme, which is designed to validate the commercial viability of leading-edge science and aid spinout formation. Only the most-promising ideas successfully ‘graduate’ from pitching to the ICURe panel, and even fewer are subsequently awarded funding.

Quinas’ Chief Technology Officer, Dr Peter Hodgson, who led the ICURe submission, said: “This award is a ringing endorsement of ULTRARAM and its commercial potential. The funding will allow us to demonstrate the performance of the memory devices at near-state-of-the-art feature sizes and help secure the significant investment required to bring a new technology to market.”

Assessors were particularly impressed by the highly innovative nature of the project, with potential game-changing impact in the global $160bn memory market and the prospect of establishing a new UK industry-sector.

Quinas Technology is headed up by CEO and deep-tech entrepreneur, James Ashforth-Pook.