Hasta La Gadget!

Hardware makers often sing the praises of their latest and greatest flash memory, but the folks at Crossbar are ready to show them up with resistive RAM (RRAM) that they’ve been quietly working on. Compared to NAND, RRAM comes in at half the size and boasts 20 times faster write speeds (140MB/s), reads data at 17MB per second, guzzles 20 times less power and has 10 times more endurance. Since RRAM is non-volatile memory, it can keep data even when it’s powered off, á la NAND. As if that weren’t enough, 3D stacking construction allows for several terabytes of storage, endowing one 200 x 200mm 200mm2 chip with one terabyte.

Unlike many tech breakthroughs however — we’re looking at you, graphene — this one is just about ready to find its way into finished products. Crossbar has manufactured RRAM within a standard chip factory, and claims that it can be churned out easily with existing production infrastructure. According to the firm, it’s in the fine-tuning process and plans to introduce the tech into the world of embedded SoCs. Sure, the outfit is the exclusive holder of some RRAM patents, but it aims to license its know-how to system-on-a-chip creators.

Update: Thanks to those readers who spotted our error on the silicon area — it’s now been fixed.

Filed under: Storage

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Via: VentureBeat

Source: Crossbar

While single-chip SSDs are clearly known quantities, they usually run at a much more leisurely pace than their larger counterparts. Innodisk doesn’t think size and speed have to be contradictory — it just unveiled an embedded version of its nanoSSD that performs almost as well as its much bigger counterparts. The µSSD-based SATA chip has a tiny footprint (0.63 x 0.79 inches) and draws just 1W of peak power, but can still read at up to 480MB/s and write at 175MB/s. As such, it’s one of the few SSDs that can theoretically stuff desktop-class storage into a smartphone or tablet. Whether or not it will is another matter. Innodisk hasn’t named customers for the nanoSSD so far, which leaves us guessing just where or when we’ll see the drive in a finished product.

Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops, Tablets, Storage

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Source: Innodisk

Despite the looming threat of being replaced by phase-change memory, contemporary memory modules aren’t quite ready to be shown the door — engineers at Macronix have found a way to revive spent NAND flash cells. Most flash modules fail after being written to and erased about 10,000 times, but Macronix found that the tired memory could be restored by baking it for extended periods of time. The team funneled the time consuming and cumbersome solution into a more practical package: a redesigned memory chip that packs onboard heaters. The new modules are designed to periodically heat focused groups of memory cells to 800 °C (1,472 °F) for a few milliseconds, effectively “healing” worn cells.

Researchers found that heated chips could tolerate more than 100 million write/erase cycles and erased faster at higher temperatures. The team said the power drain of the heaters shouldn’t effect battery life, either — chips don’t have to be heated often, and when they do, it can be done while prospective devices are recharging. Macronix will be presenting the technology at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting next week, but project deputy director Hans-Ting Lue wouldn’t say when the company plans on taking the technology to market. Lue was willing to speculate on what might become of it, however. “This may evolve into a ‘thermally assisted’ mode of operation that gives both better performance — such as the faster erasing — and better endurance flash memory.” Faster, more reliable, super-heated memory. Sounds fine by us.

[Image credit: Emily Cooper, IEEE]

Filed under: Misc

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Via: PhysOrg

Source: IEEE

The Nintendo Wii U may only have 8 to 32GB of internal memory, but the company’s taking a decidedly open approach to expanding that memory: add your own. “You can plug in a full-on three terabyte hard drive if you want. I’ll love you as a digital consumer,” Nintendo America CEO and president Reggie Fils-Aime told us during a post-press conference investor Q&A. Much like Sony’s PlayStation 3, the Wii U allows for expansion of memory via USB, whether that memory be Flash or otherwise. Fils-Aime explained that, with the continuously dropping price of memory, there was little reason to offer pricing for the Wii U — available in $300 and $350 — tied to an evolving hardware model.

“The reason we did it that way is that the cost of that type of storage memory is plummeting. What we didn’t want to do is tie a profit model to something that’s gonna rapidly decline over time. We’ll let the consumer buy as much as they want, as cheaply as they want,” Fils-Aime said.

Fils-Aime also confirmed that the Wii U doesn’t have TiVO hardware built into it — functionality will require an existing TiVO box. The same goes for DVR functionality, which Fils-Aime said Nintendo doesn’t want consumers to bear the expense of.

Filed under: Gaming

Nintendo Wii U expandable memory explained, TiVO hardware not built in originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung isn’t content to leave fast NAND flash memory to traditional solid-state drives. Its Pro Class 1500 promises a big jolt to the performance of frequently pokey smartphone and tablet storage. By how much? That name is a clue — it reaches 1,500 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) when writing data, which along with 3,500 IOPS data reads is about four times faster than any previous embedded flash chip Samsung has tested. In the real world, that leads to as much as 140MB/s when reading data and 50MB/s for writes. The speed comes after Samsung has thrown virtually every trick in the book at its new chips, including a dense 20-nanometer manufacturing process, quick toggle DDR 2.0 memory with its own controller and a new JEDEC memory standard with 200MB/s of bandwidth to spare. Samsung hasn’t named customers for the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB parts that are rolling out of the factories, although we’d do well to remember that a flourishing phone business doesn’t guarantee that the only major customer is Samsung itself: even in the face of legal challenges, Samsung still has at least one noteworthy client that tends to snap up much of its flash supply.

Continue reading Samsung starts mass-producing 4x faster mobile flash memory, kickstarts our phones and tablets

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablet PCs, Storage

Samsung starts mass-producing 4x faster mobile flash memory, kickstarts our phones and tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Aug 2012 01:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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