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Melting Memory Chips In Mass Production
chill writes "Nature is reporting that 'South Korean manufacturer Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM), the idea was first proposed by physicists in the 1960s.' With transistor-equivalent cells only 20 nm wide, switching time is around 16 ns. The first target market is cell phones, but the companies behind the technology see applications in PCs, servers, and other devices as well."
i've been waiting for pcram to show it's head in consumer electronics for a while now. it has the advantages of being hundreds of times faster than flash along with having at least ten times the write-cycle life. it could turn out to be the OLED to DRAM's LCD.
the main disadvantage is that it's rather heat-sensitive, since writing is accomplished by melting crystals with a low melting temperature.
The new chips' lifetime? The impacts on overall computer heat? The energy required to use such memory? What is the expected RAM size to be available at first?
The article looks very scarce on details other than the technology itself which, honestly, doesn't say much about the final product at all.
help, my computer's frozen! nothings responding!
did you try reseting your memory?
how do I do that?
a few minutes with a hair dryer should do the trick.
were based on the phase change between liquid and gas. Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE) memory chips. It would be one-time ROM though, not RAM, unfortunately.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I wonder how long they'd last. Apparently the crystal bond is very weak. I wouldn't want to lose my data because I dropped my cellphone. Perhaps I'm being paranoid?
This sound very similar to the phase change crystals in CDRW disks though obviously they are reading these electrically rather than optically since at 20nm you're well into the x-ray part of the spectrum.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Melts in your memory, not in your hand!
For the paranoid among us, this is really sweet. Leave the side of your computer's case open. When your front door suddenly gets knocked in and a bunch of feds start swarming into your living room, you just reach over and rub real hard on the chip with your finger. All your bits are melted.
Find free books.
I for one welcome our new memory chip overlords.
I wonder how much heat it produces as waste.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, 'Nice doggie!' till you can find a rock.-- Wynn Catlin
PCM is interesting stuff. Here's some info:
If these things run too hot, you'll literally have vaporware.
Samsung had a problem with K6X designated static ram chips. They would fail with the symptom being 'starts to work after a while' or 'starts to work when externally warmed'. They of course blamed the designer of the systems rather than offer to replace the defective parts. This failure happened across all packages.
It's a part you'll mostly find in embedded systems.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
And the Compy... just peed my carpet.
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Security for afterlife may be interesting. The more so if somebody thinks that their system or even the ram is bad. Unless it is physically ran through a fire, there will be something of use.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
is that the missing link between the electroweak force and gravity?
This has been tomorrow's hot technology for decades -- Ovshinsky has been trying to get traction with his phase change technologies since the late 60's! Ovonics?
Maybe this time?
And where are the other technologies that were going to displace the current leaders in the memory market?
Bubble memory?
FeRAM?
It would be nice to have another player in the game!
Does anyone know how hot we're actually talking to phase-change the material? I understand that the whole unit would probably get fairly warm during use, but on the scale of each bit, how much heat does it really take?
Wow, I thought only women could go from hot to cold that fast!
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
It is very interesting that this new kind of new memory chip stores information by melting and freezing crystals. I would like to try it when the devices come out, however, I have the following concerns about it: 1. Will it be oversensitive to heat variance?and will it affect its ability to store informations correctly 2. I'm afraid it's gonna be very expensive, since it's a brand new and modern technology. But anyway, I would like to give it a try if I can afford it and I'm quite excited about it.:-)
...that processors that support this type of memory will have to provide a Halt-and-Catch-Fire opcode?
Could PCRAM SSDs replace Flash SSDs? If so, I'd be rather happy as Flash's lack of longevity is one of the things keeping me from getting an SSD (well, the still enormusly high price point is the bigger one). Of course we don't have any real-world data but it still sounds interesting.
PCRAM's properties also make it sound interesting for archival storage. As long as you can keep the temperature at a sensible level it appears to be stable.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Less than your comment.
Do I have to worry about leaving one of these chips out during a New England winter evening?
To me, PCM = Pulse Code Modulation
This new part appears to be targetted at cell phones and as a replacement for NOR flash. It is likely quite good for such an application.
The part itself is not that interesting (at least outside of embedded applications). The capacity is 512 Mbits (64 Mbytes). The update speed, according to an IEEE article is 80 milliseconds for 64K words. If my math is right, this is 1.6 Megabytes/sec.
Perhaps the single most important advantage of PRAM has not even been mentioned yet. PRAM does not require the stupid block erase semantics of Flash--you can read or write as much or as little as you want, at whatever alignment, with no impact on performance. This also means that an SSD will be very simple, require no caches at all, and still have blazing fast write performance, even for synchronous writes.
PRAM will still require ECC algorithms, wear leveling, and bad block remapping, but on the spectrum of controller complexity, it is a lot closer to DRAM than Flash. (Incidentally, the same can be said of performance.) Reads and writes would still be buffered for queuing purposes, but this is very different from a cache; it is simply to allow requests to be pipelined from the storage controller.
Compared with the very simple constant time operations with PRAM, Flash is a dog. The controller must cache writes while it reads, erases, and otherwise shuffles blocks around. Moreover, as the controller operates with volatile memory, it must do this very slowly and carefully, or a power failure could severely corrupt the disk. (There are Flash SSDs with an onboard super capacitor to work around this, but they are obscenely expensive.)
Due to their inherent nature, even the best Flash SSDs have severely asymmetric read/write performance. The fact that only one company (Intel) has managed to produce a decent controller also betrays the immense complexity required to eek out even moderately acceptable random write performance. In my opinion, so called "SSDs" made with Flash don't even deserve that moniker, as they are more like a fast hard disk. (They still have a sort of geometry which constrains performance, and aren't anywhere near as fast as DRAM.)
PRAM will fix that, offering performance similar to a DRAM SSD. There are many companies banking on Phase-change RAM to displace Flash memory, Intel included. The wikipedia page has a lot more info, but basically, PRAM is superior to Flash in every way, except that the data on a prewritten chip won't survive a trip through the wave soldering machine.
What if you'd couple this with photons.. Say we polarize the crystal using a specified voltage in it's 'melted' phase... Then to retrieve the value or 'polarization' we have a photon (created with a photon emitter) go through it effectively polarizing it (the photon) and then using a photon detector converting the photon back into a voltage..
I bet you could even do some arithmetic operations using two or more crystals with different polarizations.
Voila multi value nand. So long inefficient binary/boolean logic.
The acceleration they suffer is the same (related to the height) but the movement quantity p=mv is not the same due to the m factor being a magnitude different in all case. So a BETTER comparison would be a matchbox car size, then the same weight but a different toy/substance. For example hard plastic toy will break , whereas plastic flexible toy will not for the same weight. Since it is using different kind of process and substance, you cannot readily say that because of size/weight it will be as shock resistant.
case in point : a glass ball smaller than the car box , and with less weight, has probably even less cahnce to arrive intact from the top of the building than the toy.
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I suspect this memory will have problems storing *hot* babes
It's all rather confusing, really.
*Naturally rad hardened since it is a physical state, not a charge like flash and DRAM.
Bloody f'ing awesome.
*Easy to erase in manufacture (the reflow temp is high enough to erase the whole memory)
Cool, I guess.
*3D memory arrays are possible. The same material can be used (with metal) to make a transistor, thus you can make layers of arrays.
Bloody f'ing awesome squared with a cherry on top.
*In prototypes we've seen cell phones erase themselves when left in a closed up black car on a black dash with a black interior on a hot Phoenix AZ summer day.
Prototype issue. Sounds easily solvable.
*you can't factory program the memory, it must be programmed after reflow onto the device. (flash can be ordered from the factory pre-programmed in large unit orders).
Not a big issue. Units will be ever so slightly more expensive, volume will take care of that.
*Manufacturing defects have been an issue (bubbles in the calcoginide material.
Same as above, seems solvable. Make redundant cheap parts, test them and assemble them. Or something.
All in all, this sounds great. Fast as ram, more durable than a hdd, and persistent? With the potential to scale up massively?
It's the first time in ten years I'm feeling excited about a storage tech!