New RAM technology developed

Christopher Thomas writes "Tom's Hardware Guide had a link to this EE Times article, which describes a new type of RAM developed by Hitachi. It uses stored charge in what looks like a cleverly controlled floating gate to store data, as opposed to stored charge in capacitors in conventional DRAM. Hitachi says that it will be able to ship this in quantity reasonably soon. It looks reasonably compact, and will scale much more easily to smaller linewidths than standard capacitor-based DRAM cells. It's also faster, as you don't have the whole precharge/amplify readout cycle to deal with. "

Comments

Not exactly... but

[slew]

Although the fabrication technology for the chips inside the Sony PS2 hasn't been finalized,
they are going to use what is called a hybrid process (logic and DRAM on the same die) to make
an chip with embedded DRAM. Today's technology allows about 4Mbytes of DRAM to be put on a chip
with the left over space used for logic. Yes, hybrid processes are a bit less efficient than all
logic or all DRAM processes, but are catching up (about 1 generation behind)...

Hybrid processes are currently the state of the art and allow cool things such as embedded DRAM.
(which allow really wide busses and fast access) However, the memory is still capacitors and
transistors, for standard DRAM not this wacky new stuff (but one of these days...).

(oh, and -yes- I know what I'm talking about here... :)