Samsungs Phase-change Memory (pram)

Samsungs phase change memory (PRAM) gets a press release: On the heel of last weeks missing of the 1gb, 45nm phase change memory deadline by Numonyx (ie, Micron, ie intel), comes the announcement that Samsung Electronics, a Numonyx competitor in the PCM memory arena, is planning on shipping a nonvolatile multichip pram package for smartphones that will include phase-change memory towards the end of this quarter. How much is just Samsung coming back at Numonyx’s announcement of their new 128Mbit Omneo P5Q PCM chip (single, dual, and quad I/O serial interfacee, vs Omneo P8P PCM’s parallel NOR interface) in the PCM NOR DRAM replacement battle, and how much is actual meeting the deadline specs, we’ll see.

The Samsung PCM is going to be released as a 512Mbit PCM multichip package made on the 40-to-49-nanometer manufacturing process. The backward compatability with NOR flash is what they are banking on to allow smartphones to easily embed or replace the mobile handset memory.

PCM, aka phase-change random access memory (PRAM), is a form of nonvolatile memory which uses electrical charges to change areas on a glassy material from crystalline to random, which allows it into the nonvolatile memory spec. PCM has been shown to have up to 300 times faster write speeds than NAND flash or NOR, and up to 10 times more write endurance than standard flash / ssd memory and hard drives.