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

This can be done with FPGAS!

[Krik Johnson]

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