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Matrix 3D memory is World's Smallest

Posted by timothy on from the dense-isn't-always-dumb dept.

nokiator writes "Most of the headlines about cool new high density memory technology are from DRAM or Flash manufacturers these days. Matrix Semiconductor, a small Silicon Valley start-up, broke the trend today and announced that the world's smallest 1-Gbit memory chip. Matrix's chip is an antifuse-based one-time programmable ROM. The total die area of the 1Gb chip is 31 square millimeters (smaller than the blue/red pills in the Matrix movie). Matrix claims that they can achieve this density through a proprietary 3D circuit technology that combines 150nm and 130nm process geometries. When Matrix moves to 90nm process technology, it should be possible to manufacture a 8Gb memory chip on a reasonable sized (i.e. cheap) die. There are many potential applications of this kind of low cost, very high density ROM technology, mostly in content distribution area. One 8Gb ROM chip would have sufficient storage capacity to store the contents of an entire movie using H.264 encoding."

12 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Sweet! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can think of one use right off the top of my head. Anyone remember the console design I suggested? Well, if these chips are cheap enough, it may actually make sense to go back to cartriges! Which means that copious quantities of graphics (including videos and prerecorded music) could be used in games for an inexpensive console system!

    Anyone else have any good ideas for this chip?

    P.S. Definition of an antifuse. Usually the type of thing you only learn about when you're playing with FPGAs, ASICs, and CPLDs. (The "history of programmable hardware" book that comes with Xilinx's Starter kit gives a good overview of the different technologies including antifuse chips.)

    P.P.S. If I'm doing my math right, 1-GBit of memory is ~119 megabytes. 128 megabytes if you're calculating 1-GBit == 2^30.

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    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    1. Re:Sweet! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I don't know about that. 128 megabytes is very small compared to the size of games today.

      If you read the post I linked to, the idea was to bring back classic gaming at a low price point, not compete with today's games. I was originally thinking games along the lines of Duke Nukem II and Halloween Harry. But with this chip, we could jump all the way to Super Wing Commander! (With better voice acting, of course.)

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      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    2. Re:Sweet! by kesuki · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, if these chips are cheap enough, it may actually make sense to go back to cartriges!

      For classic gaming maybe, for portable gaming sure. but you'll never get the price of solid state memory below the cost of optical storage. you can deal with the problems optical storage has currently by moving the laser beam with microscopic mirrors, rather than trying to spin the media. The problem with optical media is and was that they used design principals that work great for Magnetic media, and tried to pair that technology with optical storage. Since light can move exponetially faster (light can be moved to read 299,792,458 meters of data per second) than any physical device, it makes massively more sense to move the light, rather than the media or the laser. At current data densities.. that means the entire content of a DVD-rom would be read in 1/19933rds of a second. In other words, you'd have a 14,351,760x DVD-rom if instead of moving the DVD you move the laser light, and managed to move the laser light at the speed of light. There are of course scienitific limitations that prevent us from manipulating a beam of light in order so that it is redirected at the speed of light, but the theoretical limits of rotational speeds for DVD media are being reached. You can probabbly spin them faster than 16X, I seem to recall that at 1x a DVD-rom is moving the disc at the same rotational speed as 4x cdrom would be rotating and cd-roms got as high as 52x before cheaper media began fragmenting in peoples drives..

      So what would you rather be capped with? 18x dvd-rom drives? or not have to worry about the engineering limitations until you can figure out a way to reach 14,351,760x?

      Note: to those wondering, I based my calculations on the assumption that a dvd-rom has 4.7 billion bytes or 37.6 billion pits .4 micrometers apart, for a total length of 15,400 meters. I then used the knowledge that at 1x it takes 2 hours to read that distance, and calculated the speed rating based on that. I didn't check my math twice, so I might have made a miscalculation, but if I did someone will probably coreect me.

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      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
    3. Re:Sweet! by stonecypher · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For classic gaming maybe, for portable gaming sure. but you'll never get the price of solid state memory below the cost of optical storage.

      You know, it's funny: I remember someone saying exactly the converse of this to me about fifteen years ago, when NeXT adopted the laserdisc as a standard storage mechanism for the Cube, back when ROM was considered cheap.

      The older you get, the less likely you are to use the word never, especially in regards to the future.

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      StoneCypher is Full of BS
  2. USB Linux-on-ROM by Short+Circuit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I could do with seeing one of the fortold DVD-based Linux LiveCDs expanded even further and put on a read-only USB stick.

    Oh, and it's OTP? You mean, like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs?

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    tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
  3. Nice....... by compmanio36 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Maybe this will help the emergence of solid state memory, as I find something like a Compact Flash card much more handy than a CD. I have had more DVD's that just wouldn't play because of the tiniest scratch on them. No, if there was a slightly more expensive, but much more reliable and robust form of memory storage, I would snatch it right up. Of course, I am waiting for my crystal-based isolinear memory chips that can hold gigaquads of data (whatever the hell a gigaquad is).

  4. H.264 by after · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I didn't know what it was right away, so ...



    H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a high compression digital video codec standard written by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as the product of a collective partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10 standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10) are technically identical, and the technology is also known as AVC, for Advanced Video Coding. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May of 2003.

  5. Re:Density is fine, but speed ? by mcc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Secondly it is antifuse-based one-time programmable ROM. It is NOT a flash which can be re-written 100,000 times. So it is more useful for storing application code but not for data storage etc.

    Sounds great for something like a handheld video game system off the top of my head though. Handheld games are really hurting right now for need of some kind of compromise between hi-latency powerhungry high-capacity discs and low-latency power-cheap low-capacity ROM cartridges...

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    Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
  6. Long time in the making...but worth it... by robertca · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Great to see the Matrix Semi news on Slashdot! I was one of the early employees (but have since left), so it's cool to see something that I worked on coming to fruition.

    Earlier posters were correct in stating that it's not a complete replacement for flash (yet?) but there are still many very cool potential applications: Game cartridges (much faster access time than CDs/DVDs), toys (i.e. a supercharged Furby with a massive vocabulary), replacement for CDs/DVDs, archival digital "film", etc.

    I really like the idea of a kiosk that houses blank Matrix 3DM cards and loads of digital content. You could walk up to the kiosk and buy a game/software/movie/album/book, have it programmed right then and there, and walk away with your customized content in a few minutes. These kiosks could be everywhere...gas stations, grocery stores, etc. Extremely convenient for consumers, plus it would seriously cut down the overhead for retailers since they wouldn't need to keep inventory or have huge stores to house thousands of DVDs, etc.

  7. Cool by midnight2038 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Another great technology to be attacked by the RIAA, first in name "3D Matrix", and then for it's use!

  8. Re:but .. by zenst · · Score: 2, Interesting

    easy, changes will be stored on disc but you will still need the base rom image.

  9. on board base OS by displague · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anyone remember early PC systems that had memory cards with a read-only operating system? A friend of mine had one that had dos 5 (or the likes) and a sort of literal folder appearance gui with it.

    Rant begins. If we had ultra fast, high density ROM chips like this it might be nice to put the core of an OS onto the chip and only use the harddrive (or large RAM) for updated components. A new 'Windows' or 'Linux' system would be inserted into a little cube-tray on your computer . All your 3rd party applications would be left on the hard disk. Hrmm, or, the software could also be purchased on cubes like this. Maybe we end up with a daisy chain of USB2 attached cubes, or a cube-tray, each representing a DVD sized 3rd party application. This sounds more attuned to commercial software. Rant over.

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    Marques Johansson