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Fabs Now Manufacturing Carbon Nanotube Memory, Which Could Replace NAND and DRAM
Lucas123 writes: Nantero, the company that invented carbon nanotube-based non-volatile memory in 2001 and has been developing it since, has announced that seven chip fabrication plants are now manufacturing its Nano-RAM (NRAM) wafers and test chips. The company also announced aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and Schlumberger Ltd., the world's largest gas and oil exploration and drilling company, as customers seeking to use its chip technology. The memory, which can withstand 300 degrees Celsius temperatures for years without losing data, is natively thousands of times faster than NAND flash and has virtually infinite read/write resilience. Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs using DDR4 interfaces. NRAM has the potential to create memory that is vastly more dense that NAND flash, as its transistors can shrink to below 5 nanometers in size, three times more dense than today's densest NAND flash. At the same time, NRAM is up against a robust field of new memory technologies that are expected to challenge NAND flash in speed, endurance and capacity, such as Phase-Change Memory and Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM).
HP Memristor... Is there any connection?
About this fabulous Carbon based tech that will never go further than lab experiments. Just like every other fancy tech we hear about every year.
of those
terabytes of data in my pocket
Schlumberger isn't an exploration and drilling company, it's an oilfield services company. They don't drill the oil themselves, they sell technology, data and engineering services to people who do.
MRAM we hardle knew ye besides in chips of a few megabytes' size.
" has been tested at 300 degrees Celsius for 10 years." geez... was this really necessary? Couldnt they just make it and ship it in real products instead?
Don't forget HP is also in the game and betting big on it's flawed Memristor technology.
The summary says "Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs using DDR4 interfaces."
TFA says:
(emphasis mine), which is, err, umm, the exact opposite of "Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs" (or even "Nantero plans on creating gum stick SSDs").
As for what's being fabbed:
so, whilst this is better than "we've constructed a 4-bit chip in the lab and, yes, it does reliably store 4 bits of data", let's wait a couple of years before we get too excited.
Personally I can't wait for unreliable, slow, power hungry block based storage (e.g. HDD/flash/SSDs) to just go away.
Yet as much as I can dream and be encouraged by compatibility with existing process.. I'll only believe its real when I can buy it.
To use with my quantum computer, powered by nuclear fusion reactor.
What Nanterro is doing is prima fascie fraud, trying to capitalize on non-technically-literate investors.
They've done virtually no research since its foundation in 2001, but I constantly see them on semiconductor engineering conferences pitching to investors with something like "hey, we have a fab reaby solution, we just need few more millions you can give us to commercialize it".
I think AMD is going to beat them to the punch with HBM and module stacking and is coming out on their next gen videocards, especially since DDR5 is just starting to roll out to the PC market for generic modules. It'll be a hard slog for them to push it in anywhere unless it's price competitive, or it's in highly specialized devices at least in the short term. I'd say 10 years before it rolls out to the general public, for public use. And they'll probably be bought up by someone else in the short term.
Om, nomnomnom...
three times more dense than today's
So according to Moore's law we are about 2 years away from having these in everyday electronics?
Ps /. Mobile is really broken. I had to spoof a desktop browser to post this. Current vrowser: opera mobile 29.0
One where there is no differentiation between "disk" and "RAM"?
Looking at the pictures in the slides this looks very similar to a carbon nanotube memory process I worked on at my last job (we might have even been licensing some of the IP from these guys). We were looking for a way to shrink our microcontroller die by moving the EEPROM cells up into the metallization stacks. An additional benefit to this memory was that we would be able to increase the EEPROM memory size 2x (with a second layer of cells) with the addition of just 5 more masking layers and almost no increase in die size.
The process I worked on was nowhere near volume production when I left; but I do know we did have completely functional die with carbon nanotube memory. The one part of the process that was most challenging was dealing with the carbon nanotube spin on process. It took forever to get the right thickness uniformity and once you had it at the correct thickness you were rewarded with a material that had filled in your lithography alignment structures to the point they were almost worthless for the next patterning step. It was pretty cool tech to work on, I am glad it looks like somebody is getting it to work.
It does seem to be one of the many technologies claiming to be able to do so. Still looks to be a long way away if it's possible.
I thought FRAM made air and oil filters, not computer memory. I suppose this will help us all to remember to do routine maintenance. That or routinely rotate our mouse balls and change our computers' oil.
The density of data stored in plane goes with the inverse square of the element size (just a quick remark)
"has been developing it since,"
Since when?
"creating gum sticks SSDs"
... this will translate into a product that I can use in less than 20, 30 years? Or will become another of the military toys we civilians will never know are there?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
... if you raise the operating temperature a couple of hundred Kelvin, then quantum docoherence and environmental scattering are going to play a role, meaning that information held in any one of the cells may simply vanish by "leaking" into a coupled environment. A little bit of thermal background radiation is enough to set such processes into motion.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace