Innovative "Chips" Made from Hafnium Oxide
The memory chip company FMC from Dresden wants to close a gap in European semiconductor value creation, give AI applications a boost, and significantly reduce the energy requirements of modern data centers. At the heart of this is a revolutionary new storage technology.
The key technology that FMC has brought to market maturity is based on ferroelectric memory chips made of hafnium oxide. This technology is characterized by groundbreaking efficiency: Unlike classic DRAM memory in PCs and data centers, ferroelectric circuits can "remember" data even without constant electrical refreshment: they are non-volatile. And compared to the equally non-volatile flash memory found in USB sticks and SSDs, for example, the Dresden chip structures are many times faster, meaning that they can be used as non-volatile working memory directly behind the processor. The resulting advantage is a drastic reduction in energy requirements. This is particularly important for the booming AI sector, as cloud data centers and AI applications consume massive amounts of power.
FMC emerged from the microelectronics research center "NaMLab" at TU Dresden in 2016. The fabless company - a chip designer without its own factory - has so far had its product development processed by external contract manufacturers, Asian semiconductor factories. But its ambitions go further. As FMC CEO Thomas Rückes announced in the summer of 2025, the company is planning its own semiconductor memory factory: "With this project, we want to rebuild Europe's technological sovereignty and resilience in the field of system-critical memory chips."
This investment will further strengthen the East German semiconductor region and make the supply chains for critical technologies in Europe more secure. The project illustrates how an innovation from Dresden can take on a leading role in the global chip market after years of research and development.
FMC is pursuing a two-pronged business concept: On the one hand, as a fabless product company, FMC currently has its super-fast, low-power, non-volatile memory chips manufactured by Asian technology partners for applications in AI accelerators, memory modules and industrial and automotive applications. FMC also wants to build a memory factory in central Germany in order to mass-produce the chips here in Germany. "That would be a quantum leap," says Rückes.
Ferroelectric Memory GmbH, Dresden