Slashdot Mirror
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).
They also tend to know what they are doing, so this does give some passing credibility to this project.
I've seen a lot of things come and go, be it Tamarak's holographic storage, InPhase's holo storage, bubble memory, digital paper, optical tape drives, and so on. Since this has actual companies signing on, this appears to be more than just hype.
Time will tell though. Lots of innovations have been announced and discussed, and lots have wound up long forgotten.
Well to be fair, according to TFS, this company has done nothing but talk since 2001, almost 15 years now. Now it's finally got something ready for production.
How long has HP been talking about memristors? I don't think it's been this long.
I wonder how this (now proven) technology stacks up against (not yet proven) memristors in terms of density and speed.
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.
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.
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???
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.
No, he probably just goes to nanotechnology conferences. Nantero does have a pretty well earned reputation for spending a lot of money on not a lot of progress. Read TFA, they're claiming all this stuff in the summary is just "a few years" away, not actually here. This all has to do with Nantero closing another round of funding today not any technical milestones. It is unfair to pick on Nanotero though. There were a generation of Silicon Valley nanotech companies who all did the same thing. Nanotero has actually been very frugal and responsible compared to most of them.
... 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