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).

Comments

Re:Please, tell me more

[Grishnakh]

Until then, it's not really any better than vaporware.

Just because something's too expensive for cheap-ass home computer users doesn't mean it's "vaporware". There's a lot of other sectors in the computing market that can afford more.

Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs?

[Guy Harris]

The summary says "Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs using DDR4 interfaces."

TFA says:

Nantero doesn't plan on producing its own NRAM drives, which will initially be marketed for purposes similar to solid-state drive (SSD) gum sticks or internal memory boards. But it will license its intellectual property to companies to develop their own product. Nantero's engineers are still in the process of creating chip designs for the memory wafers.

(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 those fabs have been and are indeed producing large numbers of wafers and chips," said Greg Schmergel, CEO of Nantero. "They are sample chips/test chips in preparation for mass production, which requires the product designs to be completed."

Schmergel said it will likely take a couple more years before NRAM drives begin rolling off production lines.

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.

Re:Reminds me of

[sillivalley]

Ah, before HP did memristors, they also worked on FERAM -- that program continued with Agilent.

HP/Agilent are quite good at these breakthrough technologies -- do a search for the Champagne Optical Switch -- that was another one that was going to take over the world.

But they have had some successes -- the FBAR filter/diplexer was (and still is) a big deal, in the news recently as some individuals were arrested for trying to set up an offshore source...

FERAM (and the phase change stuff) have been the technology of the decade -- for a couple of decades now.

One of the issues with FERAM is some of the dopants needed are considered contaminants by most folks, which makes it difficult to use someone else's fab... You want to run WHAT through my fab???