The Arrival of Very Small Memory

Roland Piquepaille writes "After the ages of DRAM and SRAM memories, is this time for nanotech memories? ExtremeTech says that "molecular memories" as well as memories based on carbon nanotubes are emerging. With these nanotech memories, several startup companies are envisioning future chips mixing logic, memory and reconfigurable computing elements. One of these promising startups is ZettaCore, which has built a prototype of a molecular memory designed to replace both SRAM and DRAM kinds of memories. These molecules, which are about 1 nanometer in size, are also self-assembling, meaning that they can be manufactured with existing equipment used in the semiconductor industry. This overview contains more details about the technology and includes a diagram of these molecules in a memory array."

Right

[Operating Thetan]

With these nanotech memories, several startup companies are envisioning future chips mixing logic, memory and reconfigurable computing elements

Do they mention if the CPU and motherboard manufacturing companies care? Technology succeeds because of marketing, not because it's innovative or high quality-witness Betamax,

Emerging technologies

[zazas_mmmm]

Nanotech memory is very exciting, but there's a lot more than the technology itself that determines whether it's the next big thing. So far all I see is a weblog with some basic diagrams of how it works and some serious brochureware at Zettacore.

Not to state the obvious, but it will take low manufacturing costs, industry willingness, consumer demand, and a whole lot of marketing before this or any other revolutionary changes become de facto standards.

Better, smaller, faster, is no match for cheaper, more accessible, and well-marketed.

Non volatile?

[MrIrwin]

Unlike SRAM, which requires a charged state to be maintained, and DRAMS which reuire continuous refresh, these devices would appear to permanently change a molecular structure.....i.e. they would seem to offer high speed read write non volatile memory.

This could not only increase RAM but mean we have computing devices with just one big memory pool...no Flash, no Disk, no CD, no DVD.........

Can I order mine now please?

Good news or is it? (Dum Dum Dummm!)

[jellomizer]

Good old progress making something small and making it smaller then integrated with other parts. This can have impact in a ton of areas including smaller and lighter laptops, PDA, and PCs, perhaps a future where you can mix Xerox's Electronic Paper with this to offer interactive News Papers. As well as a lot of cool stuff. But of corse the will be people who will use it for evil Like a chip that is implanted in Tin Foil that can see where you are. And how you are using tin foil. Or Devices attached to clothing that can all you to be tracked and record everything you see and say. or a Beowulf cluster of these the size of a PC. Oh the horror! Just remember when they start using these chips for evil please remember that you recommend them first!

Some times there is truth in sarcasm, other times there isn't hmmm.

How big are your memory chips?

[stecoop]

Very cool but memory chips aren't really gigantic. I would be more interested in speed or parallel memory access.

Re:Perfect for 64bit computing.

[TwistedGreen]

Mental simulation. Synthetic intelligence. Your computer would be powerful enough to not only do flat speech recognition, but would be able to have its own natural language engine... all processed in real-time.

Sweet.

The size factor won't change much

[digrieze]

Except for embedded devices like cell phones and pdas, this won't change much. The memory density may go up, and since the chips are thinner the heat problem may improve, but the size of system chips won't change.

The reason is simple, human fingers and hands aren't going to shrink. SDRAM cards are about as small as most people can handle comfortably. SDRAM chips for CPUs work very well not at holding chips but at being easy to install and make positive contact with a large number of contacts on a relatively small edge. The design factors for these things are many, the chips they carry are only a single one of them.

I suppose someday it'll be theoretically possible to put that monster gamer machine in a thinline dress watch, but as they found with the "databank" watches the limitations are the input/output devices average people can comfortably work with, not electronic capabilities.

Creating crystals vs. large-scale patterns

[G4from128k]

The biggest challenge to this type of tech is creating complex large-scale patterns. Its one thing to create a fully regular "crystal" of 1-bit memmory cells, its another to create the highly irregular, specific, chip-spanning structures of a CPU. If we are going to make complex nanocircuits, we need a way to ensure that the right bit gets connected to the left bit.

I wonder if a better process would be to adapt the proteosynthesis process for creating micro-polypeptide clusters that are circuit elements with highly specific binding sites for self assembly. A DNA sequence would encode an mRNA sequence that is passed to a ribsome-like micro-factory. An alphabet of tRNA units would carry heavily modified amino-acids and provide both the electrical and structural of properties of the polypeptide. Different polypetides might make transistors, autonomous clock circuits, chemical-to-electrical battery subunits, wires, tees, etc.

Part of the DNA sequence would encode binding sites that are highly specific. Each electrical component would have a unique code on each terminal that only binds with the component that it connects to in the circuit. By labelling all the terminii of the components with these specific binging patterns, you the potential for self-assembly. To make a complex circuit, you make separate batches of each component, then mix the batches together and they self-assemble into the circuits. Thus, a soup of appropriately labeled transistors and wires would self-assemble into a soup of full-adder circuits.

The use of larger-scale binding sites would enable hierarchical self-assembly of self-assembled micro-components (e.g., a soup of 1-bit full-adder circuits might self-assemble into a 8-bit full-adders, or 8-bit full-adders might bind to a gated accumulator registers, etc.)

I doubt this technology would let you create a 64-bit processor - the binding-site combinatorics get too ugly. But it might let you create RAM, RFID circuits, or small CPUs (e.g., the Intel 8080 only needs 6000 transistors)

BTW, my post is a modified dup of a previous post of mine [slashdot.org], but I thought it might be relevant.

Re:I wonder...

[MrIrwin]

I envisage just swarthes of tiny black boxes interlinked by a grid of channelised synchronous serial links.

I am not a visionary, BTW, this is more or less how big digital switches in the telecoms industry works. We are just talking about scaling down from board level to chip level.

IMHO, the biggest headache to overcome in the chip industry will not be how to package and interconnect, but how to incorporate "outside world" buffers on the edge of these devices which are powerfull enougth to pump the data, rugged enougth to withstand electrical disturbances, and yet be comaptible with the process and not take up the entire chip surface.

My money, if I had any, would be on Chip on Chip solutions, that is superchips which are factory mounted on the back of buffer/driver/switch matirix chips which in turn clip into the serial data matrix.

Re:Right

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you nuts? Sorry but you sound like you have no clue what your talking about.

Stuff succeeds because of MARKETING?

Technology drives the industry.

So if your correct then if I can out with a terabyte memory module that cost a third of a DDR ram 4 gig module people will still by the more expansive RAM if I find a pretty enough box and advertise on the SuperBowl?!?

Marketing is just one part of a company and the products they market, everybody works together to create a successfull product.

Don't make me break out a list of the hundreds of products that got good PR and had fabulous slick marketing scemes and failed utterly in the real world.

DeLoren automobiles, anybody?

Sure a good product with crappy marketing WILL fail. But marketing isn't the magic bullet that you think it is. (of course by your attitude I assume your conceited enough to beleive that average person has the similar mental capacities of a sheep). Bad products with good marketing fail everyday, too.

The Size Ramifications and Questions...

[Business King]

This could mean a lot to industry. These chips can be constructed cheaper once mass production starts, can hold more bits, which means that machines with very large memories can be built cheaper than what is currently available today, and more memory can be next to CPU for caching reasons.

What I like is that games and simulations can become more complicated because of the increased memory.

Has anyone heard if it is faster or what the power consumption is going to be? I would assume that the power consumption per bit is less than what it is now. If so, laptops and portable computing devices would greatly benefit, from being able to be reduced in size, to needing less power.

We are doing a wearable computing project here at A&M and the biggest problem we have is dealing with the power constraints. Technology like this would go a long way toward increasing the period that our batteries would last!

After looking at that molecule it made me wonder could we create molecules that are photosynthetic (with higher efficiency) than solar panels?

Ok off to class. Have a good day everyone! Gig'em!