Matrix 3D memory is World's Smallest

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."

Comments

Sweet!

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Sweet!

[Short Circuit]

A CD/DVD's data area is around 10,000mm^2. That's enough area for 343 of these chips at their current size. 343*128MB=42.875GB

A better arrangement would be to make a 5" (127mm) square cartridge to fit in the same stackable region as a 5" circle. That gives you 520 of these chips. 520*128MB=65GB, which is better than Blu-Ray, and nowhere near as fragile.

And that's on their current process, which is apparently a blend of 130nm and 150nm. Wait until they shrink that down a bit.

Data density in the world has just gone up.

Re:Sweet!

[kesuki]

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.

Re:Sweet!

[jerde]

You're not trying to say that the speed of light has ANYTHING to do with the speed at which a beam of light can be swept across a medium, are you?

A point of light can be moved as fast or as slow as you want it to be. Aim a laser at the moon, now sweep it across the moon as fast as you want. Poof! The "spot" of light just moved across the moon at 18 times the speed of light... no problem.

No, the real limitation to the speed at which light can be moved along a medium has more to do with how long the spot of light must be focused on each point on the medium for enough photons to reflect back to be read. The faster you sweep your laser across a surface, the more dimly that surface is illuminated.

(At the limit, you're moving the spot of light faster than the rate photons are being emitted, although at 1 Watt that's something like 10^20 photons per second. If you need at least 10 photons per nanometer, say, you can do the math to find your maximum speed.)

Now, with an infinitely redundant power supply

[Trizor]

I can ramdisk the internet. I just need a warehouse!

Re:Now, with an infinitely redundant power supply

[AKAImBatman]

I can ramdisk the internet.

Except for the fact that this is ROM. It makes use of antifuse technolgy which works a lot like fuse technology. The idea in fuse technology is that you blow the pathways you don't want, thus creating the circut. With antifuse technology, the fuses don't normally conduct electricity so you have to blow the fuse to create pathways.

Info

Oh good

[Anonymous Coward]

The total die area of the 1Gb chip is 31 square millimeters (smaller than the blue/red pills in the Matrix movie).

Just what I always wanted - another unit of measurement. How many millifootballfields is one blue pill? What can this chip hold in terms of LibrariesOfCongress-per-BluePill?

USB Linux-on-ROM

[Short Circuit]

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?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Nice.......

[compmanio36]

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).

Not just ROM's

[Transcendent]

...but could this be used for CPU on-die caches, or is it too slow/consumes too much power? I couldn't imagine even having 8MB of cache let alone 8GB. (Which will come to haunt me later like the ol' 640K quote).

Re:Not just ROM's

[Anonymous Coward]

Read only. Cache.

Density is fine, but speed ?

[karvind]

What is the latency of this memory module ?

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.

Antifuse base memories are diode like and can be much smaller than regular FLASH memories. But these are inherently slower and also don't have any gain element (like transistor). This requires careful design to achieve good signal-to-noise ration for memory read operation

More aggressive 3D technology was demonstrated by IBM last year where they have circuits in 3D.

A startup R-cube logic is also designing 3D microprocessor where memory is put on top of the logic core to reduce latency.

Xanoptics is more into hybrid design (mixed analog, RF, optics) on a single footprint.

Some foresight required

[motorsabbath]

One 8Gb ROM chip would have sufficient storage capacity to store the contents of an entire movie using H.264 encoding.

Great, more disposable consumer things. There are many great uses for such a memory config, but the world does not need more disposable devices...

This could actually be bad

[RhettLivingston]

ROMs can be very cheap. If they get to 8Gbit and then put it in a multichip stack to get to 4 or 8 GByte capacities, it could possibly give the movies on DVD industry a run for its money. The bad side of that is that we've been benefiting heavily from the demand that that industry has created is responsible for providing cheap RO and later WO and RW DVD drives for our PCs. The movie industry would love this format because the WO and RW versions would always be way more expensive than the RO version. The cost equation of copying would change dramatically.

Re:one movie?

[EightMillion]

8 Gigabit(Gb) == 1 Gigabyte(GB)
Check your math.

H.264

[after]

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.

Amusing

[StarManta.Mini]

There's something inherently amusing about seeing this:
Allow me to be the first to say... (Score:0, Redundant)

Now, all we need are 3D Processors and RAM

[Xeroc]

It sounds like to me this 3D Memory construction is vastly improving the density, now all we need are 3D-Constructed processors! They use vertically and horizontally stacked chips to multiply the processing capability.

Also, if we could only get this in RAM! I'm looking for an upgrade, and my computer case is only so big!

Yes, for some reason, people do seem to mix up the bits and bytes, for example: Most file sizes are in bytes, to make them seem smaller, and connection speeds are in bits, to make them seem faster!*

*Actually, this probably isn't the "official" reason, but it makes sense!

Long time in the making...but worth it...

[robertca]

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.

Gb somewhat aloof measurement?

[gumpish]

I know that the bit is the atomic unit of measure when it comes to data storage and transmission, but sometimes I really wish everyone would stick to bytes.

When I see 1 Gb I have to think for a second to get to 128 MB.

31 mm movies

[Anonymous Coward]

GUEST: Do you mind if I have some more m&m's?
HOST: What m&m's? I don't have any m&m's.
GUEST: In the bowl... on top of the tv...?
HOST: Aaaaaaargh! That's my movie collection, nimrod!

Smallest memory

[Junior J. Junior III]

And here, I thought that I had the -- wait, what whas I talking about?