Contour Semiconductor

About Contour Semiconductor

Contour Semiconductor, Inc. was established in 2000, with its headquarters in North Billerica, MA, and a development facility in Silicon Valley. The company was founded by Dan Shepard, who also served as the Chief Technology Officer. Shepard began developing the core technology in the mid-1990s before officially forming the company. His background includes work at Glimpse Waters, Inc., and H&L Instruments, LLC. In January 2014, Saul Zales, a veteran with 28 years in the semiconductor industry, including a long tenure at Intel and roles at Numonyx and Fusion-io, was appointed as CEO.

The company focused on challenging the NAND flash memory market by producing low-cost, high-volume, non-volatile memory chips. Its business model was centered on the invention, development, and production of these chips, aiming to address the then-$25 billion NAND flash market with a technology intended to be cheaper and higher-performing. Contour Semiconductor secured significant financial backing, raising $3.9 million in late 2007, followed by $16 million in March 2008 and another $8 million a year later from investors including Fairhaven Capital Partners, American Capital, Still River Funds, and Eastward Capital Partners.

The core of Contour's offering was its patented Diode Transistor Memory (DTM) technology. This technology utilized a simplified fabrication process that aimed to reduce the number of mask and process steps by as much as 65% compared to conventional NAND flash memory. This streamlined process was designed to deliver a significant reduction in wafer cost. The architecture was a 4F² self-aligned structure using a vertical epitaxial diode as the select device and a phase-change material as the storage element. The technology promised improved write endurance, RAM-like latency, and word/sector/page erase block granularity at a lower cost. Target applications ranged from consumer devices for storing photos, music, and data files to enterprise SSDs and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable device markets.