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."

Comments

Already being done with conventional technology

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Perfect for 64bit computing.

[millahtime]

"18Tb of RAM"

The problem I would see with this is the addressing of the ram. You couldn't use straight pins to do that high of number for addressing and what speeds would the buss work at. There are other limiting factors on how much ram you can really work with.

Re:Perfect for 64bit computing.

[selderrr]

eum, I don't want to disapoint you, but none of these is currently RAM bound. Current connectionst models require far more CPU power than memory to keep all nodes updated. Real-time is a distant future. Even non-realtime AI is currently more stupid then my 3 month old daugther.