Currently situated within Lancaster’s Physics Department, the Quinas start-up began life as a scientific paper on Memory Cells in June 2019, marking the beginning of ULTRARAM technologies, the cornerstone of Quinas’ commercial offerings. ULTRARAM, developed by Physics’ Professor Manus Hayne, is an innovative memory technology that utilises the quantum-mechanical process called “resonant tunnelling” to deliver fast, energy-efficient, and durable writing and erasing of stored computational memory, a combination yet to be achieved by more conventional methods of data storage, such as Flash and DRAM.

The paper went on to be the 2^nd most accessed physics paper, and 41^st most accessed paper overall in Scientific Reports, with over 26 000 views. ULTRARAM was patented later that year, and a subsequent paper written on the properties of ULTRARAM became the editor’s choice for best of the year in Advanced Electronic Materials in 2022.

The following year, Quinas was formally incorporated, and since then Quinas and ULTRARAM have gone from strength to strength; in the past year, Quinas was voted “Most Innovative Startup” at the Flash Memory Summit in Silicon Valley, and Elektra’s Reader’s Choice for “University Research Group of the Year”, as well as the finalist for PraxisAuril KE ‘Commercialisation Achievement of the Year’ and TechWorks “TechNES Design Award” respectively. They have also successfully secured £300k funding through the ICURe Innovate UK programme, a second patent in the US, with further patents pending in Europe, Japan, China, and South Korea.

Speaking of the remarkable year the startup has had, Professor Hayne said: “The anniversary of Quinas’ incorporation is an excellent opportunity to take stock of the progress we have made on ULTRARAM. Working with our national and international partners and supported by UK and European funding, we are advancing on tackling the key technical challenges associated with scaling the technology. We continue to be astonished by ULTRARAM’s remarkable properties.”

The CEO of Quinas, James Ashforth-Pook added: “In its first year, our ULTRARAM universal memory solution has marked a turning point in computing technology, offering a transformative blend of speed, durability, and energy efficiency. ULTRARAM not only overcomes the ‘memory wall’ bottleneck but also enables compute-in-memory processors, significantly reducing compute latency and redefining data storage and processing.”