Purdue Researchers Demonstrate Low-Power, Fast FeTRAM Memory

eldavojohn writes "Researchers at Purdue University's Birck Nanotechnology Center have released news of a proof of concept new ferroelectric transistor random access memory or 'FeTRAM.' This new technology is nonvolatile and the researchers claim it could use up to 99% less energy than current flash memory. Unlike most FeRAM technology that uses a capacitor, FeTRAM provides nondestructive readout by storing information using a ferroelectric transistor instead. From the article: 'The new technology also is compatible with industry manufacturing processes for complementary metal oxide semiconductors, or CMOS, used to produce computer chips. It has the potential to replace conventional memory systems.' So if they get this into production, you might not have to worry about your laptop cooking your genitals. They've been published in ACS (paywalled) and the professor leading the research has many patents filed relating to transistor nanotechnology."

Comments

Magnetic memory for ssds?

[mrflash818]

...I am drawn to it ;)

Re:Magnetic memory for ssds?

[ajlitt]

It's anybody's Gauss when this will be commercialized.

Re:Magnetic memory for ssds?

[Anne_Nonymous]

Either in a flash, or in a bit; it's a polarizing subject.

Re:Magnetic memory for ssds?

[Adriax]

What the flux are you talking about. This is a transformertive technology, 10-15 years at best.

Re:Magnetic memory for ssds?

[iluvcapra]

This thread is hysterisical.

Re:Magnetic memory for ssds?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is cancer from reddit. Go there if you want never ending pun jokes.

Re:Magnetic memory for ssds?

[thegreatbob]

AC is crosstalking to itself again...

Re:Magnetic memory for ssds?

[blair1q]

I want one of these in the oersted way.

Re:Magnetic memory for ssds?

[wukka]

OHM my god, resistance is futile.

Everything old is new again?

[jandrese]

The summary makes it sound like super miniaturized core memory. I'm sure it's more complex than that, but it's still pretty cool.

Re: Everything old is new again?

[Alwin Henseler]

Not exactly - according to the Wiki, reading core memory is destructive, that is: after reading a memory location, you have to re-write the data kept there (what you just read, or modified data written back).

In contrast, above article states: "This nondestructive readout is possible (..)" (emphasis mine). No mention of tiny coil-like structures either...

Re:Everything old is new again?

[TheRaven64]

Capacitor-based FeRAM is basically ferrite core memory, but made incredibly small. This is different, as the summary explains.

the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[iggymanz]

the processor is the main source of gonad grilling heat, RAM is about 103% of power consumption. the one in my laptop pulls 31W when it is busy

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[iggymanz]

hah, fix that text edit box slashcode monkeys, wrote ram is one to three percent of power consumption but look what came out

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[Anonymous Coward]

It's there. It says "Preview".

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[iggymanz]

yes, and it doesn't always work as advertised

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[Reverand Dave]

This is looking to be more of a replacement for flash and other solid state memory so it would not be the RAM in your PC that's getting replaced, it would be the HDD which does consume a good amount of power. A more efficient system for accessing the data on your drive would in turn lower CPU power usage which would in turn reduce overall power consumption of a standard computer or laptop. This would also have implications to reduce the drain in things like MP3 players and cellphones thus prolonging the battery life in those devices as well.

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[WaffleMonster]

This is looking to be more of a replacement for flash and other solid state memory so it would not be the RAM in your PC that's getting replaced, it would be the HDD which does consume a good amount of power.

From TFA:
"They might also be much faster than another form of computer memory called SRAM"

SRAM is the same stuff used in CPU memory caches.

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[Anne Thwacks]

might also be much faster

Looks like they want some funding. You may recall the expression "pigs might fly".

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[Reverand Dave]

SRAM is used in such small densities that its energy consumption is negligible. SRAM is indeed hugely inefficient and would likely be replaced with this type of memory should it become feasible, but I think GP was and I know I was speaking to DRAM which is what the majority of people speak of when they mention the RAM in their system. When was the last time you updated your SRAM?

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[Mr Z]

Don't confuse "power" with "energy". Power is energy consumed divided by the amount of time required to consume it. Power is in watts (joules/second), whereas energy is in straight joules. (Or other units that cancel out the time factor, such as kWh.)

For example, I've noticed since I installed an SSD in my laptop that my automated backups run way more efficiently. Previously, with an HDD, the whole machine would slow to a crawl, and the computer spent most of its time waiting for disk seeks. Now, the computer keeps chugging along and the backup completes quickly and quietly in the background.

This probably consumes less overall energy, thereby prolonging battery life. However, because the backups run so fast, the CPU now gets very, very warm during backups (70+ Celsius), because it's actually consuming more power during the backup. Before the SSD, the CPU would barely heat at all, since it spent all that time idling waiting for the HDD.

The net result? My laptop is more likely to burn my lap now than before, at least during backups, even though it is probably using less overall energy and providing a greater overall battery life. So, if this FeTRAM is even faster than the flash in my SSD, it could make the CPU's peak power consumption even worse, despite the whole system being more energy efficient overall.

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[WorBlux]

Running the CPU at full speed and then dropping into idle is more efficient than running at half speed. Especially since intel processors are getting to the point you can just turn off the cores you don't need.

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[Mr Z]

It is more energy efficient, especially if you can fully power off in idle and avoid wasting energy on transistor leakage.

I'm just saying that the short term power consumption (measured in joules/second, aka. Watts), will be higher even if the total energy usage (total joules) is lower. If that "short term" is measured in 10s of seconds, then things still get hot enough to roast your chestnuts, so to speak.

Some math: Suppose the CPU has to do a total of N joules of work(say, computing checksums and compressing files) to complete the backup. It'll either do it in a bunch of short bursts as data arrives, or it could do it in one solid chunk if the data arrives fast enough. With a slow hard drive, suppose that backup takes 1000 seconds, and that with my shiny new SSD, it takes only 100 seconds. The CPU power consumption for the backup is 10x for the SSD (N/100 versus N/1000), but for 1/10th as long.

The extra CPU efficiency comes from is from saving leakage. Suppose the CPU leaks M joules per second when on, and nothing when off. You'll save M*900 joules CPU leakage using the SSD. Still, during the backup, the CPU will dissipate a nut-baking (N/100 + M) Watts for the SSD backup, versus the comparatively cooler (N/1000 + M) Watts for the HDD backup.

(Note, I'm not including the energy used by the SSD or the HDD. I'm only considering the CPU here.)

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[Thing 1]

Can you provide a reproducible test case?

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[WaffleMonster]

SRAM is used in such small densities that its energy consumption is negligible. SRAM is indeed hugely inefficient and would likely be replaced with this type of memory should it become feasible, but I think GP was and I know I was speaking to DRAM which is what the majority of people speak of when they mention the RAM in their system. When was the last time you updated your SRAM?

I was assuming the reader would understand my point.

If it lives up to the hype:
Faster than SRAM.
Uses the same area of silicon as flash
More power effecient
Practically infinite cycle life
Non volitile

What on earth prevents it from replacing everything? SRAM, DRAM, disk drives?

Re:the chestnuts will still roast in the FET fire

[Reverand Dave]

What on earth prevents it from replacing everything? SRAM, DRAM, disk drives?

Having worked in the semiconductor industry for over 10 years I can't dispute that this would be an acceptable replacement for all forms of memory inside of your system. However, I've seen several technologies (MRAM, FeRAM, RAMFlash) come and go that were touted as "the ultimate memory and storage technology" (URAM) that although were feasible, completely fizzled due to market and manufacturing concerns. DRAM is a mostly low profit industry where SRAM is a very high profit industry. Flash is a pretty stable market now with good margins, where DRAM is a stable market with horrible margins. The most likely place to target replacements is the low and medium profit margin industries and leave the high profit ones where they are. Even most NOR Flash has been dumped in favor of NAND Flash due to more stable profit margins in most markets even though some applications would work fine with NOR as opposed to NAND.

That is what on earth prevents if from replacing everything. Not that I disagree that it shouldn't, I'm just explaining.

Re:magnetic memory for usb jump drives?

[ByOhTek]

I'm repulsed by it myself, but it could just be my polarity.

Confusing muddle

[jmorris42]

Just the summary has me confused. Is this a RAM replacement or a FLASH replacement tech? Or both?

I guess between green getting grant money and industry looking to lower their power bills pushing energy savings is mandatory, but I never though flash/ssd was a power hog anyway, so if it is a flash/hdd replacement that wouldn't be all that important. Now ram modules, especially high performance 'gamer' memory has heat sinks and gets plenty hot enough to matter. Especially in heavily loaded servers hosting a lot of virtuals, those puppies get loaded up on ram so I suspect would account for a fair chunk of the total power budget in a rack full.

But I wouldn't throw venture capital at em just yet. Every few months it seems we see a story about a new memory tech. Some of them, MRAM for example, do eventually surface but they can't scale up enough to compete with conventional memory so have to settle for a niche where their special properties make them viable. Again, look at MRAM. You can buy the stuff and it really works. It is sold as a drop in replacement for old EEPROM and SRAM chips in the old DIP packages. Not only low power operation, it retains memory with the power off and no need for a backup battery. But a few Mbits per chip seems to be the current limit so it isn't a threat to either flash or dram unless it can scale up a thousand fold. Kinda like the old magnetic bubble memory that was always a few years away from making hard drives obsolete back in the '80s.... until hard drive capacity per dollar grew so much faster than bubble memory could hope to catch up to and R&D died out on it, leaving it but a footnote in tech history.

Re:Confusing muddle

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ask the Prof., it's the all singing, all dancing, (future) replacement for everything. And it'll do the dishes, and get you a date. However, reality: quoting from TFA: "However, our present device consumes more power because it is still not properly scaled," Das said. "For future generations of FeTRAM technologies one of the main objectives will be to reduce the power dissipation." So even the headline grabber "far less power" is "future devices". Yawn.

Re:Confusing muddle

[jmorris42]

Ok, I hadn't bothered to dig up real numbers. Thanks. So take a server loaded to the gills with RAM and it could easily draw more power than the CPU, especially if they are low power ones like the AMD HE parts the ram on each cpu could outdraw the processor. For that mater, if you only put 64GB in at 2W per G that is 128W, more than any CPU that has any business going into a 1U or even most 2U rack mount cases. The newest ram modules might draw a little less per GB from die shrinking but since DDR3 clocks faster it probably ends up in the same ballpark. All the attention has went into giving processors all sorts of power saving features, looks like attention needs to turn to memory now.

Re:magnetic memory for usb jump drives?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

It's gonna be in beta for a bit!.

vs. TiOO memristor?

[eyenot]

This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor/ is more interesting. But, which one are we going to see, first? I'd prefer to see HP's memristor dominate the memory, storage, and processor markets. But are we going to have to wait through some stage of planned obsolescence, first, while all these minor variations on existing components arrive and all companies seek to maximize profits on those before moving onto something that makes them all obsolete?

Longevity?

[hackertourist]

I looked into putting an SSD into my laptop, but the stories of short life (and getting shorter with each reduction in process size) are putting me off. Would this FeTRAM be more resilient?

Re:Longevity?

[WuphonsReach]

The time no longer spent waiting on the slow magnetic HDD to find the data that you're looking for on the drive along with much faster boot-up, program launching, and doing 2-3 things at the same time all weigh heavily in favor of the SSD.

Just keep good backups.

(Most of the issues seem to be firmware or the cheap SSDs.)

Re:Longevity?

[hackertourist]

Fair enough. My specific use case though (Macbook, 4 GB RAM, don't tend to reboot more often than software updates require) the main bottleneck is Firefox which fills up all available memory, then starts swapping. That, and waking from hibernation. Both involve large numbers of write cycles, so I'd burn though the available cycles in a relatively short time. An SSD would be fun to have, but not if it burns out in two years.

Re:Not that I'm jaded but....

[blair1q]

Flash takes those diversions from ordinary CMOS.

The only thing that matters is profit margin.

If this produces more on the bottom line, Flash will be the next Floppy.