New Device Could Revolutionize Computer Memory

I propose the ultimate memory: nano sized elephants on a chip. Each one never forgets.
 
+1 If you clicked on the the top ten sex symbols of the 50's and the 60's.
Hardocp , the gift that gives on giving.
 
Looks like a fabrication nightmare to me. A lot of applications outside of your home computer come to mind for me. Everything from TV's/DVR's to routers and mobile devices. Telecomm routers, and other infrastructure in-line computing might like this, too.

With the advent of SSD's I'm not sure that home and laptop computers would benefit enough to warrant scaling that tech to 45nm or below.....
 
Sounds like the memristor. when will we get to see a working prototype of that thing?
 
Stone Cold said:
It'll be slower and more expensive than standard RAM.
Click to expand...

And it will be less dense than Flash. They're basically stacking a DRAM gate on top of a Flash gate. Although this *sounds* efficient, it's not as great as it seems because DRAM needs a lot more space (for the capacitor, and fast-access wiring). This is why DRAM capacity currently maxes-out at around 4 Gbit per-chip, while Flash has hit ~64Gbit.

If they create this new chip, it will likely have speed penalties (for both NAND and DRAM modes), and the density will be limited to DRAM sizes. So yeah, useful as additional nonvolatile storage, but not enough capacity to get excited over.

The one useful application I can see in this: SUSPEND TO RAM with zero power usage. The laptop writes the current data in DRAM to Flash, and then shuts off completely (no standby current necessary) Since the read speed of Flash is fast, AND they can probably do a chip-wide copy in-parallel, reading it back into the DRAM will be nearly instantaneous. So, you have "instant-ON" without the power consumption of standby.
 
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4212372/-Universal--memory-aims-to-replace-flash-DRAM

Also, the above poster claimed it was a DRAM gate on top a flash gate. It appears to be the reverse. Also it only appears to be useful for effectively suspending memory. Note that such a thing appears to be per memory page line, and presumably could decide to suspend or refresh when refreshing the ram (thus leaving most of the memory suspended, with a cache of hotspots).

I can only assume it has the same size limitations as DRAM. If they could make it flash-sized, they would be shouting so from the rooftops.
 
How about this, make a flash drive(256gb) with a few gigs(16gb) of buffer memory to act as pagefile/swap and put enough capacitor energy storage to where it can write all of the dram stuff to flash memory in the event of a power loss.
 
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