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The Arrival of Very Small Memory
Roland Piquepaille writes "After the ages of DRAM and SRAM memories, is this time for nanotech memories? ExtremeTech says that "molecular memories" as well as memories based on carbon nanotubes are emerging. With these nanotech memories, several startup companies are envisioning future chips mixing logic, memory and reconfigurable computing elements. One of these promising startups is ZettaCore, which has built a prototype of a molecular memory designed to replace both SRAM and DRAM kinds of memories. These molecules, which are about 1 nanometer in size, are also self-assembling, meaning that they can be manufactured with existing equipment used in the semiconductor industry. This overview contains more details about the technology and includes a diagram of these molecules in a memory array."
Sorry, what were you talking about?
64 bit computers can have up to 18Tb of RAM, but with motherboard physical limitationss it iss not possible. Even with 4Gb dimms (which are expensive) your lucky to get more than 16Gb out of standard motherboards. With this technology, We will be able to break this barrier, and do wonderful things in small spaces.. I for one, welcome my 18Tb Dimm!
I have a fetish for traffic cones
With these nanotech memories, several startup companies are envisioning future chips mixing logic, memory and reconfigurable computing elements
Do they mention if the CPU and motherboard manufacturing companies care? Technology succeeds because of marketing, not because it's innovative or high quality-witness Betamax,
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this seems to bee ideal, looks like it will need little power for keeping data in memory.. however it might be terribly slow or degrading in time, the article is kind of sloppy on the details of this. anyone?
Xilinx have silicon with embedded PowerPC processors, BlockRam (chunks of pre-generated SRAM) and huge swathes of FPGA cells and interconnect. The chips have other abilities too - built-in 18-bit multipliers and communications channges (10 Gbps/channel, 20 channels!). All very cool stuff. Very expensive too :-(
:-)
I'm sort of surprised there aren't more FPGA-hackers than there appears to be. It's not hard to learn verilog (very similar to C), and despite what most FPGA designers will tell you, as long as you keep your mind focused on 'everything happens in parallel', a decent programmer can produce good FPGA code too. The start kits (300,000 gates, about enough for a hardware JPEG core and maybe a network MAC) are cheap (100 or so), and designing a processor is a pretty simple operation, and immensely gratifying
Just my thoughts,
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
it seems well and good, but i for one won't be convinced until i see them in the palm of my hand.
under my electron microscope....
and if you see me strut, remind me of what left this outlaw torn...
My memory is small enough, thank you.
Now... what was I doing?
Not to state the obvious, but it will take low manufacturing costs, industry willingness, consumer demand, and a whole lot of marketing before this or any other revolutionary changes become de facto standards.
Better, smaller, faster, is no match for cheaper, more accessible, and well-marketed.
I'm a friend of a friend of the working class.
Does this mean I'm gonna start getting spam about how HU6E my memory is? I'm starting to get memory envy.
"I wish to God these calculations would have been made by steam." -Charles Babbage
This could not only increase RAM but mean we have computing devices with just one big memory pool...no Flash, no Disk, no CD, no DVD.........
Can I order mine now please?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Hm, doesn't sound as good, does it?
Good old progress making something small and making it smaller then integrated with other parts. This can have impact in a ton of areas including smaller and lighter laptops, PDA, and PCs, perhaps a future where you can mix Xerox's Electronic Paper with this to offer interactive News Papers. As well as a lot of cool stuff. But of corse the will be people who will use it for evil Like a chip that is implanted in Tin Foil that can see where you are. And how you are using tin foil. Or Devices attached to clothing that can all you to be tracked and record everything you see and say. or a Beowulf cluster of these the size of a PC. Oh the horror! Just remember when they start using these chips for evil please remember that you recommend them first!
Some times there is truth in sarcasm, other times there isn't hmmm.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
640K should be enough for everybody
..
ohhh... the physical size
No one will ever need less than 640mm of memory
Very cool but memory chips aren't really gigantic. I would be more interested in speed or parallel memory access.
... ST Microelectronics already supply devices that mix programmable logic, memory and IO from their Programmable System Device range. But there is something of a reluctance for commercial designs to incorporate them because they're single source components. Why risk being unable to make your product in the future because you've used a specialised component in your system which has gone obsolete - especially when there's a plethora of available direct drop-in replacements for a discrete solution (EG separate programmable logic and memory).
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
I hope their research is better than their PR. Or maybe their technology really is unique!
What he did to you seems to be justified.
I mean, if the chips become so much smaller, it's easy to see the capacity of i.e. Ram chips will reach levels unimaginable now.
But how are these bits gonna be addressed ? you need *lots* of pins, and how to connect those pins to the logical layer ?
I guess motherboards, processors and such need to be radically redesigned to be able to use this new technology.
How long would it take before mainstream mobo's use other (like i.e. photons instead of electrons) than conventional techniques ?
just curious
r.
Surgical implanets to repair lost memory cells in the human brain. Was there not a film about this a few years ago called Johnny something?
Noooo! My tin foil hat might be chipped!
Wikileaks, no DNS
Fuck off Mookore. Your nothing but a sick, fat gentoo linux zealot who karma whores and then posts links to goatse discuised as debian downloads! You are nothing but a fucking moron! And I hope you burn in the firey tretches of hell!
Except for embedded devices like cell phones and pdas, this won't change much. The memory density may go up, and since the chips are thinner the heat problem may improve, but the size of system chips won't change.
The reason is simple, human fingers and hands aren't going to shrink. SDRAM cards are about as small as most people can handle comfortably. SDRAM chips for CPUs work very well not at holding chips but at being easy to install and make positive contact with a large number of contacts on a relatively small edge. The design factors for these things are many, the chips they carry are only a single one of them.
I suppose someday it'll be theoretically possible to put that monster gamer machine in a thinline dress watch, but as they found with the "databank" watches the limitations are the input/output devices average people can comfortably work with, not electronic capabilities.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
The biggest challenge to this type of tech is creating complex large-scale patterns. Its one thing to create a fully regular "crystal" of 1-bit memmory cells, its another to create the highly irregular, specific, chip-spanning structures of a CPU. If we are going to make complex nanocircuits, we need a way to ensure that the right bit gets connected to the left bit.
I wonder if a better process would be to adapt the proteosynthesis process for creating micro-polypeptide clusters that are circuit elements with highly specific binding sites for self assembly. A DNA sequence would encode an mRNA sequence that is passed to a ribsome-like micro-factory. An alphabet of tRNA units would carry heavily modified amino-acids and provide both the electrical and structural of properties of the polypeptide. Different polypetides might make transistors, autonomous clock circuits, chemical-to-electrical battery subunits, wires, tees, etc.
Part of the DNA sequence would encode binding sites that are highly specific. Each electrical component would have a unique code on each terminal that only binds with the component that it connects to in the circuit. By labelling all the terminii of the components with these specific binging patterns, you the potential for self-assembly. To make a complex circuit, you make separate batches of each component, then mix the batches together and they self-assemble into the circuits. Thus, a soup of appropriately labeled transistors and wires would self-assemble into a soup of full-adder circuits.
The use of larger-scale binding sites would enable hierarchical self-assembly of self-assembled micro-components (e.g., a soup of 1-bit full-adder circuits might self-assemble into a 8-bit full-adders, or 8-bit full-adders might bind to a gated accumulator registers, etc.)
I doubt this technology would let you create a 64-bit processor - the binding-site combinatorics get too ugly. But it might let you create RAM, RFID circuits, or small CPUs (e.g., the Intel 8080 only needs 6000 transistors)
BTW, my post is a modified dup of a previous post of mine, but I thought it might be relevant.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
but don't you have to divide the bits (by 8) to get the bytes?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I'm not greedy.. ;)
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
I wonder how my UT2004 bot-matches would go.
"
Not 18TB: :-)
2^64 = 18,000 Petabytes = 18 MILLION Terabytes.
BeOS can address it all directly. If you can find a motherboard.
Xilinx have silicon with embedded PowerPC processors, BlockRam (chunks of pre-generated SRAM) and huge swathes of FPGA cells and interconnect. The chips have other abilities too - built-in 18-bit multipliers and communications channges (10 Gbps/channel, 20 channels!). All very cool stuff. Very expensive too :-(
:-)
I'm sort of surprised there aren't more FPGA-hackers than there appears to be. It's not hard to learn verilog (very similar to pascal), and despite what most FPGA designers will tell you, as long as you keep your mind focused on 'everything happens in parallel', a decent programmer can produce good FPGA code too. The start kits (300,000 gates, about enough for a hardware JPEG core and maybe a network MAC) are cheap (100 or so), and designing a processor is a pretty simple operation, and immensely gratifying
Just my thoughts,
Krik
I have a fetish for traffic cones
y'know, it never occured to me but Dick Smiths would make a great name for a herbal viagra prodct... Make you a man of steel and all that...
this is accomplished buy execrabilious manipulation of J.'s incredible shrinking attention span (caused by lack of oxygen, plus excessive greed/fear/ego based bullshipping?).
lookout bullow.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators..... where everything that ever happened, or is going to happen, is available for download. as always, there's never a cover charge.
Doctor (to group): "Everyone, I'd like for you to meet 'Ten Second' Tom." ..."
Tom (to group): "Hi, I'm Tom!"
(The group introduces themeselves.)
Doctor (to group): "Tom was involved in a hunting accident, that left him with only a 10 second memory span."
Tom (looking shocked, turns to Doctor): "Really? I was? That's terrible!"
Doctor (to Tom): Don't worry, in about 3 seconds, you'll get over it
(blank look comes over Tom's face, then he smiles.)
Tom (turning to group): "Oh, hello! I'm Tom!"
Obligatory 80s microcomputer fanboy reference: anyone else remember the adverts for the Dragon 32 and its "massive 32Kb memory"? The VIC's 5Kb is the smallest amount I've had to work with, but only because I managed to avoid the ZX-81.
It certainly makes you think about browsers whose publicity material describes them as having a "small footprint", which then turns out to mean no more than ten megabytes. Or two thousand VIC-20s, if you want to think of it that way. A VIC is about three inches tall, so if you stack 2000 on top of each other (enough to run a "small footprint" browser), they'll be about 500 feet tall which IIRC is about the height of the Eiffel Tower. Now there's a mental image!
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Months from now Extremetech gets this memory to test, but in a tragic testing mishap they set it to half of the actual rated MHz in the motherboard bios, and don't bother to run CPUID to verify the memory speed making the same mistake they have done with their latest couple of Athlon 64 FX tests.
The first thing I thought was "OH NO! GREY GOO!", but then I read the article. Whew... More like self organizing on a prepared substrate.
There was a company, nantero, that was/is working on nanoscale RAM. Their site says that it will replace all other types of RAM. Problem is, all dates have been taken down, or else I'm not looking in the right place. I remember a year or so ago they wanted to have this rolled out by some small amount of time, like 2006 or 008, but I can't remember which. Does anybody know more?
Your brain is not a computer.
This could mean a lot to industry. These chips can be constructed cheaper once mass production starts, can hold more bits, which means that machines with very large memories can be built cheaper than what is currently available today, and more memory can be next to CPU for caching reasons.
What I like is that games and simulations can become more complicated because of the increased memory.
Has anyone heard if it is faster or what the power consumption is going to be? I would assume that the power consumption per bit is less than what it is now. If so, laptops and portable computing devices would greatly benefit, from being able to be reduced in size, to needing less power.
We are doing a wearable computing project here at A&M and the biggest problem we have is dealing with the power constraints. Technology like this would go a long way toward increasing the period that our batteries would last!
After looking at that molecule it made me wonder could we create molecules that are photosynthetic (with higher efficiency) than solar panels?
Ok off to class. Have a good day everyone! Gig'em!
It's not about smaller, it's all about bigger.
Making a megabyte of SRAM have a smaller footprint won't change much in the current world of microelectronics.
Making a megabyte-sized SMD hold a gigabyte, however...
Not sure how this would work exactly, but regardless, I'd have to spend a lot more time on Slashdot than I do to be part of any creepy little cabal. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is likely MooKore 2004 trying to get Space cowboy some enemies.
AC (posting anonymously)
...when they keep sliding between the ridges of your fingerprints?
I love challenges...
You've got it all wrong. Geek and Jock thinking is inversely proportional.
For example, for a jock, the bigger the car, the smaller the penis, while for a geek, the smaller the memory, the bigger the.. umm ego?
I could not grep any 'Bandwidth' occurence in the article.
What's the use of having a 4mm 18Tb chip if the bandwith still is 1Mb/s?
As they used to say: Never underestimate the bandwith of a truck full of tape drives
"...are also self-assembling, meaning that they can be manufactured with existing equipment used in the semiconductor industry."
OK, where are there existing semiconductor plants using nano-tech self-assembly techniques? That's an odd statement, implying the current UV light and mask etching equipment could just as easily do nano self-assembly.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
If this stuff is in standard use when Longhorn comes out, MS is going to really have to make some changes to it if they want it to be as big a memory hog as previous versions of windows were.
Technoli
Heck, I've had "very small memory" myself since about... um, since... wait a minute...
What was the question again?
> No one will ever need less than 640mm of memory
Is that straight, curled, or folded memory?
Michael Chrichton be damned. "Self-assembling" simply means that the molecules arrange themselves in a useful pattern when they fall out of solution. It used to be called "chrystallization", but the marketing people must have decided that it would be cute to invent a new word for making salt. This has absolutely nothing to do with Eric Drexler's assemblers or nanotechnology (at least as he originally defined it). And one final point: even Drexler's assemblers are only machines. THEY ARE NOT ALIVE!!!! Damn it! They will not eat your brain any more than your feature-filled VCR will.
> OK, where are there existing semiconductor plants
> using nano-tech self-assembly techniques?
> That's an odd statement, implying the current UV
> light and mask etching equipment could just as
> easily do nano self-assembly.
First of all, "self-assembly" is not "nano-assembly", it is just chrystallization. The process is chemical in nature and would require similar equipment to that of circuit board etching. Second, mask etching is still required to draw the address wires on the silicone substrate. All they do is change the "bit" material, the rest will be pretty much the same as a regular memory chip.
(Source for 16" x 8").
Finally, some smaller (and hopefully cheaper) memory! The other day I bought a 1GB (sic!) RAM and I thought: who would ever need those 1073086464 extra bytes anyway?
--
Bill G.
cragen.
And one final point: even Drexler's assemblers are only machines. THEY ARE NOT ALIVE!!!! Damn it! They will not eat your brain any more than your feature-filled VCR will.
We'd have a much more intelligent populace if it wasn't for the brain-eating features on modern TVs and VCRs . . .
This isn't an article about RAM it's about DATA!
Derrr. I don't see 40 Terabytes in a 2 inch square package being a problem with this technology. Nobody said it HAD to be used for RAM, just that they were planning on using it for that first.
Molecular memory flash drive, Anyone?.
Its interesting that nobody mentioned reconfigurable memory elements in this thread. They offer, IMHO, one of the most exciting potential advances in hardware.
Basically, the idea is that you put a bunch (from a few dozen to thousands) of very simple arithmatic units integrated right into memory. Inside memory, there is an enormous amount of bandwidth available at the sense amps --- several terabytes per second on current memory chips. These processors could all work in parallel, unfettered by memory bandwidth limitations.
The potential applications for such memory chips are very impressive. See here.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Moore's Law: The number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented.
Gates's Corollary: Since 1981, all this gain has been absorbed by Microsoft software.
Turns out it is always cheaper and more practical to improve what you have instead of adopting something new and unproven. I guess that's why hard drive arrays are no longer the size of washing machines, and hold 1,000 times what the old ones used to. So before I get all excited about this nano stuff, I want to know how it's going to be better than silicon will be ten years from now.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Now I can be a bear of little brain, and not suffer.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
hmmm.
:) However, it would seem much more sensible to use proteins as components in the circuit (this is not, I believe, what you are suggesting?). Biological 'circuits' as they are called use metalloproteins to transfer electrical signals and charge (er..'or' charge - not a biophysicist) so it would seem reasonable to make them from protein. However, the replies to the previous version of your post are right - these might have to be thermostable (in fact, probably designed) proteins.
Certainly nanotechnology shares a lot of the problems of biology - and component assembly is one of those. However I don't see that there is all that much to be gained from using biological systems in this case.
When you are doing nano-fabricating (IE : you are in a clean lab) there seems to me to be no harm in using purely chemical synthesis. Including, of course, bio-mimicry molecules for templating and scaffolding structures.
The core molecule that is shown in the link is some sort of functionalised zinc porphyrin (I see a nice ferrocene group there too). I think that attaching such bulky substituents to amino acids for further attachement to tRNAs would be cumbersome.
There are probably ways to do much the same thing with similar complex metallo-organic chemicals. Indeed, many groups have made self-assembling structures from just such rigidly units with metal ions as linkers.
The only real reason to use biomaterials is the prospect of using mutations to alter the structure. A bit like er..PROMs (? not sure) so you could 'evolve' circuits by altering the DNA and growing the result (bit like compiling code...
but don't you have to divide the bits (by 8) to get the bytes?
If memory were bit addressable, you would be correct. However most modern machines are byte addressable. That means that each memory address refers to a full byte.
It is perfectly possible to build machines that are only word addressable, where a word is 32 bits or 64 bits, or even larger. The advantage is that you can address more memory with a given address size. 32 bit words means address size * 4 bytes, 64 bit means * 8 bytes. The disadvantage is that you can't easily work with chunks smaller than the word size. Most current machines fetch and write at least a byte from memory, even when they are only reading or updating a flag of a single bit.
Since most folks are used to working with byte addressable, and there are no major reasons to change, I would expect byte addressable to remain the standard for a long time to come.
plus-good, double-plus-good
This article is buzz word compliant.
C 4-DC31-1055-973683414B7F0000&sc=I100322
That said, it's important to remember that computers have allready entered the nanotech age quietly and without really telling anyone. The gapping that is possible with modern lithography is a mere 70nm across.
That's right; 70nm; in other words not only are most modern computer chips measured in nm, there measured in mere tens of nanometers!
And they're still getting smaller.
Source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000CE8
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
From this I get that the slowest decay rate for a given state of these molecules is in the minutes range, not the years range. This would mean that we'd have to go back to the old adage of "If your computer crashes, power down for at least 30 seconds before powering it back up." Actually it would be longer than that, but...
Also, "removable media" of this type could only be removed for no longer than a minute or so without a battery. Sorry dude, but the ascendant to the DVD is but a pipe dream for these molecules.