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64 Mbyte Write once CMOS Chip from Standard Fabs
brian wang writes "Matrix semiconductor has taped out 64 Mbyte write once chip. It is 8 layer memory that can be made at standard fabs. They will be made at Taiwan Semiconductor initially in a 0.25micron process.
It will be compatible with Flash.
Obviously when they move to 0.18 micron and 0.13 and 0.10 micron processes that already are producing chips the memory size will shoot up to rival CDRoms from single chips. Revolutionary impact for handhelds, PCs, ROMDrives etc..."
See, I knew it: Little is better.
I'm not too much of a hardware guy, but I do know that the BIOS of a computer are made of CMOS. I also know that they're extremely small. Would this have any impact on instant boot projects like LinuxBIOS? With 64MB you could fit pretty much the entire boot procedure. That would be sweet.
Interesting stuff, but how much storage space will we ultimately need to carry with us?
With technology like this advancing along with moore's law I can see that it shouldn't be a few more years before it'll be commonplace to carry devices with GBs of data in your pocket.
It's a common point to note that famous phrase that "640Kb should be enough for anyone!", but I think that now we truely are starting to reach the limits of neccessity for normal portable memory.
How much do you really think YOU need to carry?
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
I remember, years ago, a presentation of write only memory modules, in which you could write TERABYTES of data, in a very small (for the time)dip 16 form factor.
That was a lot of capacity.
And for the fact you could never read it, bah, examine your computer, your diskets box, your cdrom collection... how many Gb did you not read in the last three years.
"Using a 3-D fabrication method that deposits layers of circuits with a modified CMOS process, the technique can yield nine to 10 times the amount of chips per a given wafer, providing a cost advantage over traditional flash memory, according to Matrix..."
So we could see a CDROM-capacity write-once "consumable memory" chip that was the same size as a 64MB chip now. Nice, but the article later says:
"The company said it sees no limit to the number of layers that could be added to a device."
How does that jive with the earlier stated scalability of 9-10x?
"'If they can really do this and produce working devices, it is very hot,' said Richard Wawrzyniak, an analyst at Semico Research (Phoenix)."
Oh, so heat is the limiting factor! <g> Seriously, though, I agree with his assessment—having the devices actually work would greatly contribute to their coolness factor.
Really, I do hope they do well. It's always nice to see new technologies. I don't think this is particularily *new*, so to speak, but you get the idea.
... you're stuck with what they give you.
Now, the question is, will general consumers have any interest in these? I wouldn't want my motherboard's BIOS to be on one of these things. Even Intel and IBM make mistakes; if I had to buy a new chip with the new BIOS revision on it, I'd be irritated.
Likewise, for PDAs and the like, it's even more doubtful. Sure, if they're cheap, it might be useful for *some* things. But do you want your OS on there? Really? Understand that you can't upgrade it, you can't change anything that's on there
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
To creating real Write-only memory.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Put another way, does write-once in this case mean it's like a CD (commit entire data payload in one chunk and seal it forever), or like a blank book (fill in pages as you go).
If it can be done incrementally, that represents a significant advantage over CDs, other factors being (for the sake of argument) equal.
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I guess about all you could use it for is to cheaply up the amount of phrases a Furbie doll can spew out.
Oh my God, now you've done it! Thanks to you Furbies will have a practically limitless repertoire! We'll never get a moment of quiet!
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
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Perhaps in the future your processor will be the size and shape of a die or cube of cheese.
Why should we care about this?
:)
- Write Once Memory: CD-ROM is 10x larger, and is very cheap. DVD-ROM will eventually be about 100x larger.
- Solid-state storage for Digital Cameras: Write-Many memory chips are readily available. They are expensive, but reusable. Will this write-once chip be cheap enough to make it worth while? Or are these chips much smaller, making this interesting to travelers?
- Computer Memory: Obviously not useful there (I don't see a market ofr single-use computers
Is there other info about this memory, showing why this is of any use?
ShoutingMan.com
Behold, the power of Cheesium 886.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
"See, I knew it: Little is better."
Which girls have you been arguing this with, anyway?
what's the point if I can only write once?
Tell him what some uses are, Johnny!
unless they really make the modules so cheap they're practically giving them away
I believe that's what they're envisioning. From the article..."The company envisions its chips being cheap enough to be sold in multipacks at grocery checkout counters". Wow, an 8 pack of 64 meg memory modules for the same price as a pack of batteries? Even one for the same price as a pack of batteries would be worth the cost.
I formally declare this a good thing. But don't take my word for it, read the article yourself.
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
Imagine how much money AOL could save in shipping if they could mail you a tiny chip instead of a CD!
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I do. give me these devices that are 640MEG
replace CD's with random access roms? they're 1" by 1" by 1/16" so I can carry 10 albums in my pocket, or 300 albums in my armrest in my car.
and this is using standard CD technology ideas. plug in, no spinup time, no track seek time no skips no worry about not playing when I'm flying through the air after rearending the car stopped on the highway for the squirrel. No skips at all.
I'd buy it, hell yeah.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sounds like Stephen R. Donaldson had something going when he described datacores in the Gap series.
If you can jack one of these things up into giga, tera, or larger ranges, then you can start using it to provide write-once history logging. Big brother, black boxes, personal recorders...
It's obvious that the purpose is to provide cheap readonly[1] media to record[2] companies. They'll write their encrypted MP3 equivalent[3] to these things rather than CDs and they can then drop their expensive CD pressing operations.
It'll be the next big music format.
[1] After all, why should they pay for read/write media?
[2] And video companies once the chips are big enough.[3] WMA?
Deleted
I just want to make sure everyone got the joke
A lot of the "consumer" applications that are being kicked around would probably be served just as well, for a LOT less $$, by SRAM and a watch-battery to back it up. Now I'm no engineer but if one really wanted a gig or more of cheap storage, why not take a gig of SRAM and back it up with a battery? Granted, battery backup is not forever (5 yr max?), but given the price of ram, I would think you could even make the thing completely redundant internally (two batteries and banks of SRAM that compare against each other RAID style)... I would expect the pressure on battery technology and SRAM pricing to move this idea in the direction of workable long before mega-storage write-once PROMs take off. I can't imagine these things being a replacement for CDRs or Floppys or much other than, err, low-storage PROMs.
Even those silly USB Keychains could use such a technique. 2x512MB DIMMs plus a lion or nimh battery to back it up (recharge off the USB bus) would be ~$100. Of course, I may be totally out to lunch here...
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
I always felt that the big advantage with digital cameras was the fact that you didn't need to get the pictures developed. You have them instantly. You've got to store the pictures somewhere. I wouldn't be too bothered by storing 50 images on a $5 chip. At least that way I don't have to worry about my hard drive crashing and losing all my data, or something like that.
A few people have been speculating about 3D processors based on this or similar technology. While this is a neat way of building memory, don't get your hopes up for 3D processors any time soon.
What they've done, according to the article, is deposit several layers of thin-film transistors on top of a more or less standard chip.
These transistors will be *slow*. That's fine for something you're using to replace flash, but not fine for a processor. The hard problem of building high-quality transistors in a multi-level structure has not been solved.
The other problem is heat. With a hierarchically-designed memory array, you can make a larger array without power per access going up very much (at the cost of a very small amount of extra delay). This means that packing ten times as much memory into the same chip area won't cause much of a heating problem.
The core of a microprocessor, on the other hand, is pretty much all active at once (or mostly active). You have calculation results flying to reservation stations everywhere, you have a lot of fully-associative arrays being indexed, and you have a lot of logic churning away. Packing this into a tenth the area would make the used area much, much hotter (remember Newton's law of heating and cooling - you need the same heat flow from a tenth the area, so ten times the heat difference between chip and environment).
The good news is that you might be able to put the L2 cache in higher layers with technology similar to this and save space that way, but this is a one-time saving, with a performance penalty (until the holy grail of stacked transistor technology is found).
Still an interesting accomplishment, of course.
Samsung has unveiled a gigabit flash (128MB) that, unlike this matrix part, is erasable. If that's not enough, you can buy a
2 gigabit flash stack (256 MB) from irvine sensors.
True, these are packaging techniques for more density, and aren't as cool as putting more memory on one die, but don't overlook them: they offer about the same densities. Hopefully, we can eventually combine both techniques, for even greater densities.
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Retailers will love this. Now they can make you keep coming back for more. Watch for this to be popular with camera makers, even if a reusable medium is more cost-effective for the end user.