Numonyx

Researchers are two steps closer to creating a mass-market version of technology called phase-change memory that could change how computers of the future are put together.

Intel and Numonyx, the chipmaker's joint venture with STMicroelectonics that's focused on flash memory, announced Wednesday they've built a new type of phase-change memory chip they hope will help fulfill the technology's promise for small size and large capacity.

Its 64-megabit capacity isn't momentous on its own--Numonyx announced a 128Mb device in 2006 and Samsung said in September it's producing a 512Mb chip. But what is significant are two major advances in making the decades-old idea practical.

First, the researchers built a grid of wires into the chip so a computer can easily control the writing of a 1 or 0 in each of the 64 million memory cells. Second, they announced their manufacturing process lets them stack several layers atop each other so memory can be packed more densely in a given volume. … Read more

Though solid-state drives are in vogue, market forces and technical issues are giving the venerable hard-disk drive new life.

DRAMexchange, a Taipei-based market intelligence firm, said last week that the adoption of solid-state drives by computer vendors has slowed as the price of the NAND chips--the raw material of solid-state drives--has increased. The firm also said that computer makers have been cautious about using solid-state drives because current Windows operating systems are not fully optimized for SSDs.

And the popularity of flash storage is waning in Netbooks. These tiny laptops at one time used solid-state drives almost exclusively. But Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others are moving en masse to configurations with large hard-disk drives in lieu of smaller-capacity solid-state drives.

SSDs typically offer higher performance--often much higher performance--than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts.

While those merits still apply, lingering doubts about the long-term retention of the data in a solid-state drive is making the hard disk look not quite so pass?. Ed Doller, the chief technical officer of Numonyx, a flash memory chip maker which was spun off from Intel and STMicroelectronics last year, addressed this issue in a recent phone interview. Numonyx makes two kinds of flash: NOR, used for storing computer programs, and NAND, used widely as a data storage medium in digital cameras, media players, smartphones, and solid-state drives.

"It's if versus when. With a hard drive it's if it's going to fail. With an SSD, it's when is it going to fail," Doller said, who critiques NAND only because his company is looking for a new storage medium--such as phase change memory--that can overcome some of NAND's inherent limitations.

Doller spoke about an epiphany he had after booting up a 20-year-old IBM AT. "I fired that thing up and it actually booted from the hard drive. If that same computer had been built with a solid-state drive, I can almost guarantee you that would not have worked. It would have lost its information over that period of time," Doller said.… Read more

It was a search for the essence of things that lead to the memristor, says UC Berkeley professor Leon Chua.

This week, HP Labs announced it had made a memristor, or memory resistor, a fundamental circuit element first theorized by Chua decades ago. If they become commercially practical to make, memristors could lead to very dense, energy-efficient memory chips that don't cost much because they don't need much silicon. A memristor has a variable resistance; as a result, memristors can "remember" how much charge was applied to it. (See here for more on HP's memristor.) … Read more

It's the tale of the lost circuit.

Thirty-seven years ago, Leon Chua, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, mathematically theorized that scientific symmetry demands that there should be a fourth fundamental circuit element. Engineers were already familiar with resistors (which resist the flow of electricity), capacitors (which store electricity), and inductors (which resist changes to the flow of electrical current), which can be combined to build more complex devices. The fourth circuit, which Chua called a "memristor" for memory resistor, would register how much current had passed.

"He looked at fundamental circuit equations … Read more

Don't make computers seek out data. Make the data move to where it can be used.

That, roughly, is one way to describe the racetrack memory concept, which IBM argues could one day lead to memory that could hold 100 times more data than flash memory does today and cost 100 times less. So that 2GB card you bought for $20 this week would hold 200GB, or more than a lot of notebook hard drives, and cost 20 cents.

In racetrack memory, information is stored in the domain walls, or boundaries, between magnetic regions on a wire. The domain … Read more

It's been a long haul for phase change memory, but the goal is in sight.

Numonyx, the memory joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel, is already shipping samples of phase change memory (PCM) chips to customers and will start shipping PCM chips commercially later this year, CEO Brian Harrison said at a press conference Monday.

"We expect to bring it to market this year and generate some revenue," Harrison said. "It is one to two years before it becomes widely commercially available."

Hearing a CEO talk about existing samples and near-term commercial shipments is a … Read more

The offspring of Intel and STMicroelectronics, Numonyx, is ready to open its doors amid a volatile market for its flash-memory chips.

Numonyx is the combination of Intel's NOR flash memory business and STMicro's NAND business, which will make it the largest provider of NOR flash memory in the world and the largest flash supplier to the mobile phone market, said Brian Harrison, the former head of Intel's flash memory group and the new CEO of Numonyx. "We have a very broad product line that's not typical of a start-up company by any means," he … Read more