NYT: Scaling Memory Outlooks

moneybag The NY Times has a good summary article on the emerging memory industry, with Rice University and PrivaTran, one of the early producers of the Rice 5nm silicon oxide switches, being put head to head with HP’s memristors and Intel, I.B.M., Numonyx and Samsungs phase change memory push:

H.P. has for several years been making claims that its memristor technology can compete with traditional transistors, but the company will report this week that it is now more confident that its technology can compete commercially in the future.

In contrast, the Rice advance must still be proved. Acknowledging that researchers must overcome skepticism because silicon oxide has been known as an insulator by the industry until now, Jim Tour, a nanomaterials specialist at Rice said he believed the industry would have to look seriously at the research team’s new approach… [] … The new method involves filaments as thin as five nanometers in width — thinner than what the industry hopes to achieve by the end of the decade using standard techniques. [NY Times Full Article]

With 3 big industries pushing the field in the 5 year time frame, time to start working on the big data issues. Analysts in the financial sector tend to talk about the benefit to the information economy of the trend, yet most of those benefits come from improving the software and mathematics of real-time algorithmic big data crunching. The interest for distributed device makers though lies in the ability to better capture, buffer, and feed the logarithmic increase in real-time sensor data coming from smaller and more highly distributed consumer and professional devices. Power consumption and network buffering are two areas that have at least as much room to improve into as Moores Law does for silicon.




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