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 ...

Comments

This is a Good Thing

[XChemie]

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! :)

Re:May be serious.

[Jage]

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. :)

Some Background on this Company

[orpheus]

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.

Though I can hardly blame /. for not checking further, I think readers might want to.

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 /. article

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.

_____________

Re:Some Background on this Company

[Animats]

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.

Ovshinsky has a decent track record in products:

• His companies manufacture amorphous solar cells in volume, but they cost about the same as silicon solar cells. However, they're flexible, and so they're widely used on boats. Some sailboats even have them on the sails.
• Nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) battery technology was developed by Ovshinsky's company, and all 16 makers of NiMH batteries license his patents. Camcorders, laptops, electric scooters, and the GM EV-1 use this technology.

Ovshinsky's big problem has always been with his manufacturing processes. Since he's just about the only player in amorphous semiconductors, he has to develop his own fab techniques. That's a big job; many billions of dollars have gone into making silicon semiconductor technology work as well as it does. ECD has to match that, working alone. They never really have, which is why amorphous transistors and amorphous ICs never took off, although both did work. (Burroughs even shipped some machines with his early non-volatile memory in the 1970s.) His battery technology also has fabrication problems. But slowly the stuff is starting to work.

May be serious.

[Soko]

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...

Re:RAM

[multipartmixed]

> 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.

According to your formula, if you keep bandwidth constant and increase latency, then your performance increases.

Clearly, this is wrong.

How about:

Performance = Bandwith / Latency

Have a nice day.

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