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New RAM Based On CD-RW Film On Horizon
SiliconShaman writes: "Ovonyx Corporation is reporting initial success at producing a very cheap non-volatile RAM. Supposed to be cheaper, faster, etc. than conventional Flash memory. Applications include satellite and aerospace, cell phones, the list goes on. Details can be found here: Short Technical Presentation in HTML." "OUM memory technology," says Ovonics' Web site, "is similar to DRAM and many orders of magnitude faster than Flash write." The proliferation of devices which will need copious nonvolatile memory should mean a healthy market if this technology reaches the production line. I know my camera could use some more storage ...
They've (As in Energy Conversion Devices) had prototypes of this technology for years (in fact, since the early to mid 70's!). The problem (as it is also with holographic storage) has been getting it to be economically manufactured. Perhaps they've finally gotten it down from atmospheric pricing.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
For a little background (I'm a chemistry grad student working in this area), the maturing of this technology is good to see, after many years of battle vs. magnetic storage for both CD-RW and non-volatile memory. I think the potential here is very great because of the relative prodcution simplicity and cost benefit compared to competing technologies. This stuff is not vaporware! The technology of phase change media (based upon optically/electrically induced reversible amorphous to crystalline transitions) has been researched extensively over the last two decades by big names like Philips, Micron, 3M, IBM, etc. But magnetic storage had more research money for quite awhile for alot of reasons; however, it's phase change media that eventually got used for your CD-RW (not CD-R though...) discs. Making non-volatile RAM was the next obvious target, but latency was a problem until recently (and the inertia problem of changing manufacturing methods). For some more info, goto the website of the parent company Energy Conversion Devices. It's based out of Troy, Michigan and was founded by Stan Ovshinsky, who's somewhat of a rogue in the physics community. But it's a cool company that also uses a similar technology to make surge protectors against the EMP from a nuclear blast! :)
The presentation states that OUM is only good for about 10 trillion writes. If I bang on the same bit for a week or two at a rate of (say) 10^7 writes per second, won't it wear out?
Of course, most bits won't see this kind of punishment, but I can imagine data acquisition apps that might trash a few bytes of storage within a year or two or ten. Hopefully the machine's L2 cache would effectively rate-limit writebacks to main memory, but it should still be possible to set up an aliasing situation that would cause a line to be flushed on every write.
So many people have written something to this effect that I'm just going to say here, this is not about storing little re-writable CDs in your computer. It uses the same material (that's chemical composition, no more) as the re-writable CDs. Other things, like the filesystems they use or the cute little motor to spin them up, will not come with the package. For people who already know this, I apologize, but I'm convinced I do have an audience out there.
Thank you.
Furthermore, in order to catch on, the product has to be compatible with existing systems and be either a lot faster, significantly cheaper, and/or come in much higher capacities; otherwise, they are not going to catch up with the economies of scale of flash memory. If they can do that, I think there is a market: non-volatile, fast storage is useful in more and more applications.
(As an aside, they are not talking about optical storage, they are talking about taking advantage of electrical properties of materials that are ordinarily used for optical storage.)
this wouldn't be necessary for anything except Windows machines.... ;)
Hey now, Macs have their own share of problems..
IIRC, in most cases the cache only mirrors what's in the main memory, so it wouldn't be a problem. However there would be 2 other issues.
Firstly, booting would write over part of the memory - you'd have to tell the OS to recover, unless that's what it did all the time. You could have a reserved area for booting, then the system looks at the main memory and recovers.
The other problems is saving the entire state - you know the memory, but not what was going on in the processor, network, etc. when the thing goes down. So some things will be unrecoverable. And of course if the thing really crashes it won't help without some pretty serious recovery tools.
Perform the copy CPU register state and RAM image to secondary RAM in hardware as an atomic operation which occers once per clock tick -- if possible, by some subdivision otherwise. From then on copy only deltas between any two states in the rest of secondary RAM like most versioned filesytems. The number of potential versions stored is limited to the size of secondary RAM and the amount of change over time, like any other cache.
It's a pretty cool idea... anyone know if some exotic hardware with these kinds of capabilities has ever been tried?
AmigaOS, or should I say Kickstart, partially implemented recovering memory state after reboot (yeah, and this was done way back in 1985.) After rebooting, it wouldn't erase memory, but the OS would look for some system vector tables and do some basic sanity checks to see if the tables are corrupted. Some nice uses were for example a RAM-disk that could survive rebooting.
Sometimes the system hanged in repeating crashes and reboots, though. Then your only option was to really erase memory, for example by toggling The Most Significant Bit (ie. power switch).
Other bad point was that also viruses liked to hook themselves to those vectors, enabling them to survive reboots.
For the rest of the state, maybe you could log some state changes to for example display adapter, network card and etc. Or maybe your devices would have to expose their internal state in some compact structure you could just copy to log areas periodically (when the system would be in special recoverable state.)
I don't know. :)
The distinction is probably very similar to FORMAT /Q (QuickFormat -- just rewrite the FAT), and FORMAT /U (unconditional format). The former rewrites just the FAT table, with the presumption that the media has not grown any defects. The latter reformats the entire media, thereby "Refreshing" the sector boundaries (if a floppy) and possibly identifying any grown defects.
In the case of a CD-RW, I'd imagine performing a full-blank gives you a marginal increase in recording quality (ie. you're more likely to get a good, clean "burn" subsequently), and it may possibly identify defects (such as scratches) during the erase. Not sure.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Thanks for the update. I'd seen those implications in the ECD website, but...
I am not sure that NiMH batteries were invented by ECD. The ECD website only claims a) all "significant" manufacturers of NiMH have a license with them (implying that some don't - why?) and b) the first commercial NiMH manufacturer 'used' Ovionics technolgy. This company (Gold Peak) was also 'one of ECD's early licensees' -- this seems like an odd way of saying "we invented NiMH". It is almost as if they are trying to imply that without actually saying it
I tried checking the USPTO database, but if he had the groundbreaking patents, they are too old to show up on the database. I concluded this by checking the bibliographic entries for current Ovshinsky NiMH patents (which contain the patent numbers of preceding/related art) I presume he would cite his own groundbreaking patents. It is possible that I'd learn more by reading the complete applications, but IANAL (and no one's paying me for *that* depth of research)
I was aware of their early flexible amorphous solar cells in the 70's, but I didn't know these were a major part of today's market. Are they?
Besides I'm not sure that one major product (or maybe two) in 40 years is a "decent track record in products" (ECD was founded in 1960) ECD seems to have some viable products, but I'm surprised that they seem to be incremental improvements over the state of the art, while their past (and present) technology always seems billed as 'revolutionary'
Of course, that can happen. I think Harry Bede is a good example. He designed and produced the BD-5 airplanes and an interesting 'inline' automobile -- both products I'd have bought instantly (well, once I could afford them) but his companies can't seem to stay in production very long.
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If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
I'm a little curious, though, whether this is best suited for compact applications like flash RAM, or as a means of replacing both RAM and fixed-disk technologies. If the size reduction is substantial enough, and it's as fast as RAM, it's possible that a system might ship with a single fixed rotating rewritable drive (like a hard drive) using OUM technology to provide a significant chunk of storage space (say, multiple gigs) with high access and transfer speeds. Imagine your swap partition running at the same speed as your RAM. That'd be pretty spiffy.
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For example if I have SDRAM (64 bit bus) PC133 10 ns memory with bandwidth of 1.06GB/s and RDRAM (16 bit bus) PC800 20 ns memory with 1.6GB/s which ones I can interleave to get memory with latency of 12 ns and bandwidth of 4GB/s (256 bit)? (I have really no idea of real latencies of those memory types and it hugely depends how you measure it - time it takes for chip to read bits or processor to receive required bits. But what I know is that SDRAM has much lower latency)
I'm not aware of motherboards supporting SDRAM interleaving but Intel already does this with RDRAM in its new mobos so it should be possible. I think that this is because SDRAM already provides enough bandwidth in most cases.
Note that when using DDR SDRAM you can double the bandwidth (for SDRAM) and one can only wonder why is/was Intel trying to push something like RDRAM into market?
For those still wondering the answer to second paragraph I will give a hint: you cannot reduce latency with interleaving.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
I can't wait for the day when I can get something like this installed in my skull, so that when I think to myself, "Mental note: remember to...", I'll actually do it!
Got Rhinos?
One million memory accesses per second is not unrealistic. At that rate, your OUM will wear out in about four months.
What that number means is that they only TESTED it for a few months. B-) If you look at the curves, they were showing no sign of curving. So there's no indication that it would stop working after 10 trillion, or even 100 quintillion.
Read another foil, and you see that read is CONstructive when it's in the high-conductance state, and "the current is negligable" for the low-conductance state.
If there's any destructive effect, it would be the read current in the low-conductance state gradually coaxing the device to grow a crystal across the boundary and switch to the high-conductance. But even if you hammer on the bit that won't happen for at least four months.
So even if that turns out to be a problem, you could treat it like a dynamic RAM that has to be refreshed ONCE every FOUR MONTHS. B-) Much better than silicon DRAM that needs a refresh a thousand times a second or so. Kick off a cron job three times a year to refresh your RAM.
Do that and it looks like it could last until the rest of the computer fails from diffusion of impurities through the silicon.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Strange link between this name and the name of the outfit that was promoting amorphous semiconductors with great performance promises about 30-35 years ago. It was headed by an inventor named Ovshinsky...
If you'll read all the foils you'll see they licensed the amorphous switching element from one of his companies (which is using it to make CD media.)
Another successful product from him is the flexible amorphous solar panel. Three layers of amorphous solar cell (intercepting three different bands of sunlight), electrically in series and grown on a stainless steel base.
Because it's amorphous it can be bent quite a bit without breaking (though it isn't quite as efficient as crystaline cells because there are more sites where carrier-pairs can anhialate rather than giving you current).
You see 'em on boats all the time. I've got one tied to the cabin-top on mine, keeping the battery up when the boat sits for a while. (On a previous boat it was the only thing charging the 85 AHr deep-cycle battery, which powered the radio and lights. It could bring the battery from 25% to full charge in a couple weeks. We never needed to hook up the charge circuit from the aux engine.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The technical details of this article are close to zero, if you look closely.
Read the foils from the presentation of the research report here.
It gives far more detail than I've ever seen for an announcement of any other memory technology. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
1. What effect will this type of memory device has under radiation bombardments?
The conductive state is a (poly?)crystaline material that shorts two electrodes.
The resistive state has a region of amorphous (glassy) material in the space between the electrodes, surrounded by the remaining material which is still in the (poly?)crystaline state.
Writing it consists of MELTING the region between the electrodes, leaving it either cool enough that it solidifies quickly into the amorphous state, or hot enough that it solidifies slowly and the crystals grow into the melted region as it freezes. Think frost on a window in the winter.
(Of course at these scales, even "slowly" is measured in nanoseconds of elapsed time.)
Charge carriers from particles won't make significant increases in current in the glassy state, or remelt it and let it crystalize. Particles might disrupt SOME of the crystaline conductive state - but there is a LOT of it in parallel. By the time enough raidation hits it to increase its resistance measurably the rest of the components in the computer will be approaching the "sand" state.
Think about trying to use radiation to disrupt a wire until it won't conduct, or a glass bottle until it will.
2. What effect will magnetic forces (and/or electro-magnetic forces) has on this type of memory?
It isn't made of magnetic material. (Again, think of using a magnet to disrupt a copper wire until it stops conducting, or a glass bottle until it starts.)
If you put a big enough EMP into such a chip you might generate enough voltage and current to write the bit. But you'll probably fry both the static protection and the components in the pad driver/receivers on the chip's terminals with much smaller EMPs, because the interconnect wiring is a much bigger antenna.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Is there anything else such as applications, server services (ftp, http, nfs, etc) or non-games that I can see the performance increase in?
When I said "frame rate," I didn't necessarily mean first-person shooters. I could have meant radiosity raytracing frame rate in a m****n p*****e studio's rendering farm (T*y S***y 2 took nearly forever to render). And there's always SETI@home, distributed.net, and that new one that pays you for your MIPS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As soon as I heard the name "Ovonyx" I was reminded of Stanford Ovshinsky, a physicist who claimed to revolutionize amorphous silicon technology, reportedly 'inventing' a field of Materials Science called "ovonics". He was a minor hero to me as a teenager (the 70's). I'm not such a fan now.
/. for not checking further, I think readers might want to.
/. article
Though I can hardly blame
Sure enough, on the "About the Corporation" page, it confirms: "The Corporation Ovonyx, Inc. (Ovonyx) was formed in 1999 as a joint venture between Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. (ECD) and Messrs. Tyler Lowrey and Ward Parkinson. ECD is Ovshinsky's company (founded in 1960). Surprisingly, no link or further information is provided on ECD, which according to the Ovonyx Corporate page "has been actively pursuing phase-change material and device structure development,optimization and characterization for many applications - but principally for optical and electrical memories."
From what I recall from the 70's/80's, ECD wasn't 'focused' in these areas, but on solar panels (hence the name "Energy Conversion Devices"). This may explain why "ECD's contribution to the Ovonyx joint venture was all of its intellectual property (IP) in this area" [optical and electrical memory]. Perhaps ECD didn't feel it could make use of this IP, and turned it over to two former top Micron Technology (chip) execs. Read on for details
THE BACKGROUND
Ovshinsky was a darling of the Japanese in the 70's/80's when Americans were in shock because the Japanese were using American findings like the management theories of Edwards Deming (who was revered like a god in Japan), 'process control', and "just in time" to turn out cars that the US auto giants couldn't match. American business was also awash in culture shock from dealing with the Japanese business systems (kureitsu, etc.) as equals and as a potential market.
Ovshinsky raised money by chiding US corps that they would miss the Next Big Thing if they didn't invest in his work, but his primary business relationships were with the Japanese.
The PBS show NOVA even did a one hour documentary on him ("Japan's American Genius" 10/27/87) that seemed to promise that cheap high efficiency amorphous solar cells would be around any day now. I've kept my eyes peeled ever since (I instantly made the Ovonyx connection in 5/2000!), and never heard anything about ECD. The advances in amorphous technology always seemed to come from elsewhere.
I haven't been impressed by ECD's ability to bring *any* product to market in 40 years, and I don't know of any breakthroughs they have made or licensed -- and all their 'background' and 'product' links seem to point to nonexistent documents in a 'drafts' folder. However, I may be wrong, or perhaps the documents are being updated, so I refer you to ECD's home page, which is (perhaps unsurprisingly, considering Ovshinsky supposedly pioneered 'ovonics') http://www.ovonic.com not to be confused with the OVONYX site in the
Perhaps I am a little jaded, because I was once a big fan of Ovshinsky (as he was presented), but what I've read in the OVONIX and ECD (OVONIC)web sites seems to have an unusual, almost Microsoftian degree of 'spin'. Caveat emptor.
However, if anyone out there knows of some concrete product or technical advance that proceeded directly from ECD or Ovshinsky, I would be *most* happy to hear about it. You have to reclaim those childhood heroes when you can! It's good for the soul.
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If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Questions -
1. What effect will this type of memory
device has under radiation bombardments?
If this memory is to be used on spacecrafts, it has to be able to withstand radiation bombardments.
2. What effect will magnetic forces (and/or
electro-magnetic forces) has on this
type of memory?
If this memory is to be applied in miniature appliances, the chances that these appliances be in contact with (or being put next to) magnets or under magnetic fields is very large. So, will the amorphous (disordered atomic structure) and crystalline (regular, highly repetitive, and ordered atomic structure) stage be reversed/change/effected due to the magnetic effects?
We do have to be concerned with the effects, because we just do not know what this type of memory device will ultimately be used on - it could be used on embedded devices to control anti-lock brakes on cars, for example - and if the memory device is "affectabled" by either magnetic or radiations, then, this type of memory device should not be used to power computers which controls critical functions that may affect the safety of human lives.
This is just my humble 2 cents.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
That's only half true. The cache holds a copy of what should be in RAM. There are two possible common scenarios:
The latter form of cache performs alot better, for a couple reasons. First, writes to memory are slow and a write-through cache doesn't hide them. Second, alot of writes are redundant or can be combined with other nearby writes and a write-back cache serves as a filtering and combining mechanism. The drawback is that the cache has a different picture of memory than the external memory has.
Anyway, the way you do "recovery" is to checkpoint the OSes state every so often (like, say, every timer tick when you do a task switch). You can save all the registers, flush the cache, and checkpoint off to the OUM. The device issue you mentioned is solved in a similar manner to APM, I'd imagine (not that I know the solution, but I'm saying it's a familiar problem that's already being attacked).
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Some clarification:
- They dont use RW "Film". Their IC will just contain small amounts of a similar ternary alloy. (Ge2Sb2Te5)
- Writing to the memory cell works by heating it with an electrical current !! Temperatures in excess of 600 degress celcius are required for a phase change. It seems that this is the main problem with this kind of memory.
- Reading is done by measuring the resistance. No refreshing or anything similar required.
- They dont have a working sample of a full memory chip yet. As of now it seems to be VAPORWARE
In case you want to know more than written in the short HTML marketing piece check this out:
http://www.ovonic.com/technology.pdf
However there are other companies with very interesting (and available) products in the nvRam
sector, which are trying to come by the disadvanteage of flashram:
RAMTRON: Using perovskite crystals to store data. (FRAM) Advantage over flashram: Faster , less power consumption, higher data retention.
Quite interesting: www.ramtron.com
SIMTEK: They have srams that automatically store the containing data to an on-chip Flashram when the power drops. And vice versa.
Seems a litte brute-force to me, but seems to serve its purpose well.
www.simtek.com
ZMD: Has almost the same product as SIMTEK. They just do less bragging about it:
www.zmda.com
AIUI the reading is done by simply measuring the resistance of a tiny cell of this amorphous material, and that would be pretty fast and easy. But writing to it requires a phase change induced by heating. That sounds slow and expensive by comparison.
Add this to the problem of the memory "wearing out" after a few weeks of being toggled at 10MHz and it looks more like a replacement for Flash memory than for DRAM.
Nevertheless, it sounds pretty cool.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
My tech friends are usually stunned when I pick up a stick of PC100 that has 4.5ns instead of PC133 at 5.5ns - they say "PC133 is better!".. and nevermind why. Alittle arm-wringing and explanations of latency and what cache hits v. misses do to their processor performance usually helps. For the stubborn, I ask them to bring their "PC133" ram over and we run a Quake demo. Guess who wins?
I don't want to hear about how much more RAM the industry is capable of making - I'm interested in hearing how fast they can make it. Bandwidth * Latency = Performance.. you cannot have high bandwidth and HIGH latency and get good performance - we've used up all our tricks in that area.
That being said, there are alternatives underway. I'll give you a few hints and leave you to it: magnets and optics. Enjoy!
All you'd need to do is have the RAM written to the OUM every few minutes (or even seconds). In the event of system lockup, the hardware can clear the memory and write the OUM backup back into RAM. Voila! You're back where you started (more or less).
Of course, this wouldn't be necessary for anything except Windows machines....
Got Rhinos?
Why should I care about and/or buy faster RAM?
Two words: Frame rate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
However, unfortunately, due to the fact that devices of this nature could conceivably store illegal copyrighted materials, the DMCA precludes this technology being made available in the US.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Thier news page shows they have deals and investment from Intel.
Very cool stuff, especially for laptops. You could selectively power RAM to save a few watts here or there. The only problem I see with a system with nothing but non-volitile RAM is filling the cache inside the processor. Easy to fix I'm sure, but if the cache was non-volitile too, you'd have the entire machine state saved.
Intel got in early - I'm sure Transmeta would be terribly interested in RAM that you can take power away from, and have it maintain state...
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
You know what really upsets me? They talk about this thing in a bit of detail, but they didn't say anything about prototypes, or the new plant they've got for making this stuff, or anything like that. So, is this stuff in production? I doubt it. Quite honestly, I hate hearing about this stuff two-three years before it comes to market. It's starting to piss me off. Tell me about something when I can buy it, or tell me about it with enough time to plan for it. Not before.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
When I stop to think about it, though, this OUM stuff doesn't replace a certain form factor, or a certain interface or API - it replaces a memory technology. If it works, and can be used as a replacement for DRAM and Flash, I can't think of anything to stop them from making SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards with OUM technology inside them. And if it stores more data in the same space, that'd be a pretty nice feature for digital cameras, too. Keep the interface pinout and form factor and all that the same, just replace the storage innards.
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