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Carbon Nanotube Memory on the Way
Cyberherbalist writes "Nantero, a nanotechnology company, is expecting prototypes of products using NRAM technology (nanotube-based, non-volatile random access memory) to be available in 2006. In the article at nature.com, it says that 'the company has succeeded in making circular wafers, 13 centimetres in diameter, that hold 10 gigabits of data.' And they are ten times faster than 'flash' memory."
For one, it's first-gen stuff. It will likely gain density quickly in the future. Also, don't forget this is basically NVRAM: way faster than a hard-drive, and way more permanent than DRAM. It fills a unique niche and cannot directly be compared to or replace either of the two. (Well, it could replace hard drives, if it shrunk enough). The day is coming (slowly) when the primary storage on any computer system will probably be some sort of nonvolatile solid-state device. Hard drives with spindles will be for bulk data (music, movies, documents), while the OS goes on the nonvolatile ram which is neccesarily much smaller in size, but more reliable and faster to access. You can do things that way now under Windows or Linux by buying a 1-4 GB-ish solid state flash disk for your root disk (or C: drive) and then putting in a large normal hard drive for all your bulk data, but current SSD technology is overpriced and suffers from various little problems, both of which make it impractical for mass deployment even if the OS vendors put more thought into supporting the setup.
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For one, it's first-gen stuff. It will likely gain density quickly in the future.
It may gain density, but gain little in reliability. I have a Ph.D. in solid state physics, so I should respond. The carbon nanotubes bend to make connect with an electrode, so something moves. This is usually a bad sign for long-term reliability. Ask telecom technicians if they would like to replace their solid state transistor-based switches with moving switches. Their answer will be that these moving parts wore out.
This memory might not improve to the point that it becomes more reliable than your present NVRAM.
It is very easy for a scientist to produce one working device in the lab. We call these hero devices. The rest of the world does not know this. When engineers get ahold of these claims, though, they tear them up, since the process might not be cheap, reliable or scaleable.
So yes, it might get better, but I wonder if this group and the related scientist have invented new physics. Have they fundamentally changed the way mechanical switches make contact, the way electrons move and are held in capacitors, and the way domains set up in magnetic memory? I think not. I think this is a step backwards towards old mechanical swithces made smaller and reliable memory made unreliable.
See Nantero's press releases; they announced their 10Gbit wafer in May 2003. Their partnership with LSI Logic isn't news either, that was announced June 2004. The fact that they're still signing new partnerships on a steady basis tells me this technology is not a dead-end (yet).
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...