Intel Set To Demo PRAM

xavatarx writes "Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner is set to give the first public demonstration of the company's PRAM (phase-change RAM) technology at this week's Intel Developer Forum conference. 'Intel and other companies are counting on PRAM to replace both NOR and NAND flash memory to generate the demand required to produce the new memory chips in volume, and drive down costs,' the article says."

Comments

Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured

[asliarun]

A lay question, and I had asked this question in the previous /. thread about PRAM, but did not get an answer..

How are Intel and others managing this chalcogenide glass manufacturing in their usual silicon DRAM process? Is this glass fused/bonded to silicon or something? Or is it an alloy.. and if so, is it a non-silicon alloy (silicon is a non-metal)?

I tried the wikipedia entry on this subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory) , but couldn't completely understand:-
a. How it really works in an electronic circuit and in a microprocessor (how do you control the heating/cooling at the chip level so that phase change occurs)?
b. How it is supposed to be volume manufactured? Would they require a new fab entirely to manufacture PRAM (if they do decide to commercialize this technology), or can an existing fab be retro-fitted to support this manufacturing process?

Appreciate any insights on this subject. At a high level, this does sound like a very exciting new technology.

Again?

[maxwell demon]

Well, we've already seen MRAM and FeRAM, both already in production. None of them seem to have replaced Flash or even DRAM yet. So what is it about PRAM that one should expect it to be different?

BTW, is there anywhere a concise table comparing the characteristics of different RAM technologies?

Re:Here's the issue

[jhfry]

I used to maintain an IBM Pi2 Mini Computer that had drum storage up until the late 90's. I really like the idea, a read/write head per track eliminated all seeking and made for very predictable response times for our real time processing requirements.
I would love to see the hard drive industry start incorporating more read heads in to drives.

Imagine a single drive with two armatures, servo's and read/write heads. You could effectively double the throughput, reduce seek times, and improve latency. It would be like having RAID 1 read speeds, and write speeds faster than a single conventional disk.

If they could change the form factor and make the enclosure square, they could shove 4 read/write mechinisms in a single drive increasing it to 4x throughput.

The only reason I can imagine for why this hasn't been done is that there are alignment issues with multiple heads on the same surface, or it's prohibitively more expensive than a good raid controller and multiple drives (which I doubt).