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Nanotube Non-Volatile Memory Entering Production
hovermike writes "Nantero and LSI Logic are expected to announce that nanotube non-volatile memory will be going into production, at least as far as the NY Times is concerned. Nanotubes have been discussed previously, Nanotube Applications..., and Buckminsterfullerene..., but I'm certainly surprised something like this has moved into production this quickly. Could this be the ultimate 'bubble' memory?" Reader hovermike writes "The press release can be found at the Nantero website. I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life."
I have never understood why companies would release text information exclusively in PDF format. So here you go... and since I learned my lesson about Karma Whoring, I'll post AC. No troll text, I promise.
For Immediate Release Contact: Suzanne Gibbons-Neff
SGN Public Relations & Marketing
(203) 656-0833/ Suzanne@nantero.com
Nantero, Inc. Announces Carbon Nanotube Technology Development Project with LSI Logic
Woburn, MA - June 7, 2004. Nantero, Inc. announced today that it is teaming with LSI Logic Corporation (NYSE: LSI) to develop semiconductor process technology, expediting the effective utilization of carbon nanotubes in CMOS fabrication.
The joint development project is taking place at LSI Logics Gresham (Oregon) manufacturing campus, which is capable of process R&D down to the 65nm node.
The high electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and tensile strength of carbon nanotubes make them highly attractive for electronic device applications. These properties enable performance breakthroughs both through incorporation into existing semiconductor products and in the development of next generation products.
"LSI Logic has all of the necessary ingredients to accelerate the development of carbon nanotubes in CMOS: a strong focus on innovation, a highly qualified engineering team, and a world-class fab, said Greg Schmergel, Nanteros co-founder and CEO. "All of these factors and more makes LSI Logic an ideal partner for us in developing Nanteros carbon nanotube technology for high-volume manufacturing.
Nanteros proprietary processes for the use of carbon nanotubes are CMOS-compatible and are presently under development at LSI Logics Gresham semiconductor manufacturing campus. The LSI Logic facility was recognized by Semiconductor International magazine as Fab of the Year for 2002.
"LSI Logic has and continues to focus its process technology R&D efforts to solving technology challenges, such as the issues associated with low-k dielectrics, said Richard Schinella, LSI Logic vice president of Wafer Process R&D. "Teaming with Nantero, LSI Logic is applying its silicon integration skills to realizing the potential of carbon nanotubes in advanced CMOS manufacturing.
About Nantero
Nantero is a nanotechnology company using carbon nanotubes for the development of next-generation semiconductor devices. Nantero itself is developing NRAM -a high-density nonvolatile random access storage device. The potential applications for the nonvolatile storage device Nantero is developing are extensive and include the ability to enable instant-on computers and to replace the memory in devices such as cell phones, MP3 players, digital
cameras, and PDAs, as well as applications in the networking arena. NRAM can be manufactured for both standalone and embedded memory applications. Nantero is also working with licensees on the development of additional applications of Nanteros core nanotube-based technology.
About LSI Logic
LSI Logic Corporation (NYSE: LSI) is a leading designer and manufacturer of communications, consumer and storage semiconductors for applications that access, interconnect and store data, voice and video. In addition, the company supplies storage network solutions for the enterprise. LSI Logic is headquartered at 1621 Barber Lane, Milpitas, CA 95035. http://www.lsilogic.com
Nantero is creating NRAM, a high-density nonvolatile random access memory chip, which it hopes will replace existing forms of memory. Its technology, using cylindrical molecules of carbon known as nanotubes, will be used on a production line in LSI's semiconductor factory in Gresham, Ore.
Carbon nanotubes are among the new forms of carbon, known as fullerenes, whose discovery helped ignite interest in manipulation of materials at the molecular level, the field known as nanotechnology. Fullerenes consist of carbon atoms arranged in patterns resembling the nodes of the geodesic domes designed by Buckminster Fuller. Nanotubes, which researchers first created in 1991, consist of single- or multiwalled cylinders that can be less than 10 nanometers wide. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.
The transition from laboratory to production line took more than nine months, the companies said, adding that considerable work remains to improve the chips.
"But it's following the same type of road map as any other semiconductor product," said Norman L. Armour, vice president and general manager of the LSI factory in Gresham. Mr. Armour said that processors embedded with carbon nanotube memories in place of static random access memory, or SRAM, could be supplied commercially from the factory's pilot line next year if no problems developed.
If so, analysts said, such devices could emerge as one of the first products to exploit something other than the extraordinary strength of carbon nanotubes.
The nanotubes are up to 100 times as strong as steel and one-sixth its weight, qualities that have quickly led to their use in products like tennis rackets and automotive plastics, where they are mixed with other materials to improve their performance.
Researchers have also shown that the nanotubes have extraordinary electrical and magnetic characteristics. Recent reports, for example, have highlighted their ability to be quickly altered from metal-like conductors into semiconductors and back by applying magnetic fields.
Such novel qualities have helped make them a powerful symbol of nanotechnology's potential, but except as strengtheners nanotubes have proved difficult to bring to market. The challenges have included preventing clumping and the tendency of the simplest manufacturing approaches to produce mixes of single-walled and multiwalled tubes with varying characteristics.
Nantero's design applies charges to groups of single-walled nanotubes suspended over an electrode. Applying opposite charges to the tubes and the electrode causes the tubes to bend down, creating a junction that represents a 1. Applying like charges forces them apart into the 0 state. As with all digital memory, NRAM stores data as a pattern of 1's and 0's.
Carbon nanotube memories could sharply improve the performance of cellphones, laptop computers and other electronic devices. Like today's flash and SRAM memories, carbon nanotube designs can maintain data when power is turned off, an advantage over dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, memory chips, which must constantly be refreshed. But it can operate considerably faster and on less power than flash memory, and is much cheaper and more compact than SRAM.
Analysts caution that Nantero's carbon nanotubes face plenty of competition. Memories that hold their charge are crucial to improving the performance and design flexibility of a wide range of electronic products, and thus have become the most profitable and fastest-growing segment of the $35 billion memory market, according to Radu Andrei, a Web-Feet Research analyst based in Dallas. That is attracting heavy investment in technologies that could replace flash and SRAM.
"I count around 30 technology variations trying to get a piece of that pie," Mr. Andrei said. Among them are I.B.M., Intel, Motorola and numerous start-ups. Flash memory is now so inexpensive, he added, that innovators will have a hard time displacing it from all but the most demanding applications even if they surpass it technically.
"I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life"
:)
With that said, I'm sure they are taken out of production again
Great stuff. But, is it reliable? This technology is becoming mainstream too quickly.
Does anyone have more data on this?
I was doing expirements of buckminsterfullerenes back in 1996-97, it shouldn't be suprising that a superior material made it to market in 8-10 years after the start of expiremental evaluation. I doubt it took that long to develop nylon, rayon, or any of the other wonder fibers into products for sale.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
STM recently announced that they are entering the production phase for PRAM, or phase-change memory. This is important because PRAM is nonvolatile and has the potential to be written and read much faster than flash. There will come a day when DRAM will go away and we'll be left with extremely fast and simple NVRAM for main memory and possibly even archival storage. It'd be really great if there was only ONE memory in a system. At this point, most high-performance CPUs are mostly cache memory anyway.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Sounds like it would be lower power than flash memory- and if they can get the manufacturing process cheaper, this could mean finally having say a 40 GB memory card on my PDA- copy my entire desktop to the PDA for mobile applications.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life.
It seems that a 1GB nano-tube based memory card should last the rest of your life. Of course, a silicon-based memory card to last the rest of your life would have to be much larger.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
And to losing them all in one fell swoop?
--- What?
The articles seemed weak on details, does anyone know what sizes of memory these will be available in? Are we talking megs of memory (like current flash cards), gigs of memory (to replace hard drives), or teras of memory (for the future)?
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Last I heard certain nanotubes were toxic to the environment. Does anyone know whether these suffer from the same issue?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life."
whoa get a life!
How about trying to use it to feed children?
Yeah, 'cause a typical CF card contains 100% of the US RDA of High-Impact Plastic! Not to mention 62.5% of the RDA for Silicon, plus important trace elements like copper wiring and gold plating!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
How about trying to use it to feed children?
I seem to remember an earlier story about fish dying when they were fed nanotubes- so I doubt you'd want to feed it to children.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I doubt that a child would eat a memory card, even if they were really hungry.
Decode these
I don't empty my 8MB card to the computer often enough already, so if the card never got full the family pictures wouldn't get seen by anyone else until I died and someone else inherited my camera.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Hardware vendors use this technolog to bring us a truely "instant on" feature to our laptops and PCs ?
that we will be promised larger, faster, cheaper, longer lastings products, but do to low levels of adoption they will be more expensive then the existing products at release. Slowly over time, as more people switch to the new products, the price will rise even higher with demand, and our formerly cheaper products will rise in price too, because they are now in limited supply.
It's just a speculation.
And just how exactly is that supposed to happen with a chip encased in plastic? Are you going to put your memory chips in a blender? I guarantee you- if you powder any silicon chip to a size where it could become airborne and inhaled, you're likely to cause siliconitis at the very least (this used to happen to coal miners all the time, horrible disease that can take 60-80 years to do enough damage to your lungs to kill you).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
You've obviously never been the parent of a 18 month old toddler.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life
5Mbit pictures? 5Mb = 640KB, so you can already store 6,250 pictures on a 4GB microdrive. Not a lifetime's amount, but quite a long time at my rate of picture taking.
I suspect he meant 5 Mpixel, which would be much bigger than 640KB each.
Nantero isn't publicly held, though, so this isn't a stock hype.
Maybe they'll look something like Will Ferrell's tiny cell phone in the SNL rich clothing store sketch ?
Cheap, well-insulating, durable, and rather bad for construction workers and others who shred and inhale lots of it? I think how the hell is anyone gonna inhale it?! pretty much sums it up. Disposing of these little nanotubes should be easy enough if you can burn them, I would think. That leaves the question of how to disassemble the chips in an orderly fashion, but I figure that's pretty much the same problem you're faced with when recycling electronics today. Not that people don't just dump their old machines in the trash, but anyway.
I'd worry a lot more about the flame retardants and other goo that's still being used in enormous amounts in computers. There's a half-year old computer in my office, and ever since it got here I've had to open the window every morning, or the fumes from it make me cough. Not sure what exactly the computer is giving off, but whatever it is I don't think it's particularly good for me.
This signature is not in the public domain.
only needing one ... more people thought like this, about lots of things.
... and you'll still be needing piles and piles of 'media' around, for those moments.
... and so will the markets.
but alas, what will more likely happen is 'consumericans' and other dis-world orders will 'drive the demand' up for super hi-res video, and we'll all be having HDTV Home Video dumps to sony-marketed 'nano-bricks'
things will just get 'prettier' and 'waaay bigger', the functions will stay the same
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Check out some of these sites:
Nano Dot Article
Tech Review
A neat simulation
WordIQ
These all do a good deal to help explain / show you some interesting things. Give them a look-see.
I'll believe it when the memory futures market nose-dives. If I go to Micro Center, and regular RAM chip prices are down 20% or more across the board, then nanotube memory is DEFINITELY coming to market like, soon.
No, I'm not using the 80's translation server, I really do talk like this... sorry, I lived in the valley in the 80's (when I was little) and it totally warped my speech.
stuff |
So while not a pure play on a single stock, it can still suffer from some of the volatility generated in the market environment.
It says nothing about being ready to mass-produce the technology. In fact, the way I read the article, the partnership is so that they can try to create any sort of working process that is even remotely cost-effective and works reliably. This is a long way from commercial viability. Without this partnership, Nantero has no ability to fab this kind of technology at any volume on their own. It sounds as if they are using the joint partership to go hunting for funding. I don't even see a concrete product announcement
If you have space to take all your 5 Megapixels photos for the rest of your life, you'll start taking 50 Megapixels photos. If you still have more space, you'll start making videos.
Just bring the space, and we'll use it!
Because the "new, new economy" business model is to make it difficult for customers to use your product, and then sue the pants off anyone that tries to help them.
Accordingly, I expect Slashdot to receive a subpoena shortly to determine who the above poster is -- Because he has now violated the DMCA by "bypassing an encyption technology" !
Yippee! A new revenue stream for Nantero !!!
How about current computer components? There's plenty of toxic stuff already in your computer -- the trick, as it has always been, will be: don't leave it in the environment, don't snort it, don't eat it.
If you can handle that with current computers, you're probably good to go for nanotubular memory.
The article says develop semiconductor process technology. This is MARKETING people. Nothing has happened, no technology has even passed between the two companies. It's a deal between the companies to both share the expenses of brining this to market. But the reason it's short on details is becaues there aren't any.
Ummm... I wish my tennis racket was made of nanotubes. I could sell it and never work again. Take the article with a huge grain of salt, because they've confused nanotubes with graphite fiber.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your