Hasta La Gadget!

Silicon oxide has long played the sidekick, insulating electronics from damage, but scientists at Rice University have just discovered the dielectric material itself could become a fantastic form of storage. Replacing the 10-nanometer-thick strips of graphite used in previous experiments with a layer of SiOx, graduate student Jun Yao discovered the latter material worked just as well, creating 5nm silicon nanowires that can be easily joined or broken (to form the bits and bytes of computer storage) when a voltage is temporarily applied. Considering that conventional computer memory pathways are still struggling to get to 20nm wide, this could make for quite the advance in storage, though we’ll admit we’ve heard tell of one prototype 8nm NAND flash chip that uses nanowires already. Perhaps it’s time for silicon oxide to have a turn in the limelight.

Silicon oxide forms solid state memory pathways just five nanometers wide originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The memristor‘s come a long way since being hypothesized back in 1971. If you ask HP Labs, the history of this particular memory technology didn’t hit its next milestone for almost four decades, when the company produced the very first memory resistor chip. Just last month, the Labs group proved its little transistor could handle logic and data storage, and as of today, the company’s announcing a joint development agreement with Hynix Semiconductor, with a goal of bringing these chips to the market — and rendering flash memory obsolete.

That challenge against flash (not a very popular naming convention these days, it seems) was thrown down by HP Labs Senior Fellow Stan Williams, who posits that the memristor is “an universal memory that over a sufficient amount of time will replace flash, DRAM, magnetic hard disks, and possibly even SRAM.” But onto the immediate, albeit aspirational goal (i.e. not a commitment, which he stressed on multiple occasions): Williams hopes to see the transistors in consumer products by this time 2013, for approximately the price of what flash memory will be selling for at the time but with “at least twice the bit capacity.” He also claims a much smaller power requirement of “at least a factor of 10” and an even faster operation speed, in addition to previously-discussed advantages like read / write endurance.

With Hynix on board, the goal is to make these “drop-in replacements” for flash memory, whereby the same protocols and even the same connectors will work just fine. For HP, however, Williams says there’ll be an initial competitive advantage for the company due to its comfort level with memristors’ unique properties, but that other companies will be encouraged to license the technology and experiment with new possibilities in hardware design. Williams wouldn’t give any specific product examples where we might initially see the memristor, except to repeat that it’ll be anywhere and everywhere flash memory is. Fighting words, indeed. We normally don’t get excited about minute hardware components — not often, at least — but we gotta say, the seeds of the future look mighty interesting. Can’t wait to see what germinates. Highlights from our talk with Williams after the break.

Continue reading HP Labs teams up with Hynix to manufacture memristors, plans assault on flash memory in 2013

HP Labs teams up with Hynix to manufacture memristors, plans assault on flash memory in 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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California-based flash memory card manufacturer SanDisk has created a small, super-skinny new memory chip the size of a stamp that can hold up to 64 GB of memory.

The SanDisk iSSD measures a diminutive 18 by 20 by 2 millimeters and weighs less than a gram. At 64 gigs (with smaller capacities available), the chip doesn’t quite offer enough oomf for a fully-functional laptop, but should be able to add some memory power-ups to just about everything else.

For now, the company has not released a price on the chip, but is making it available to manufacturers for evaluation. Should tech manufacturers like what they see, we will see this chip make way for all sorts of super-slim, super powerful devices coming our way.

This is the newest entry in the realm of SSD (solid-state drive) technology which allows for memory chips that are increasingly small, require no moving parts, and can run fan-less. They are the reason our gadgets and gizmos continue to get smaller, flatter, lighter, and more powerful.

via NYT

A new chip could improve error correction in flash memory, and might also lead to more efficient spam filtering and shopping recommendations.

Lyric Semiconductor, a small MIT spinoff, has created an error correction chip that uses a technique called “probability processing” to guess the right answer or solve a problem.

The chip, called LEC, is 30 times smaller in size than current digital error correction technology. That means manufacturers can create higher density chips that offer more storage at lower costs.

“This is not digital computing in the traditional sense,” says Ben Vigoda, founder of Lyric Semiconductor. “We are looking at processing where the values can be between a zero and a one.”

Error rates in flash-based storage are of concern to both consumers and manufacturers.

“The issue with flash is you get higher and higher bit errors as you move to smaller geometry,” says Greg Wong, an analyst with research firm Forward Insights, “so to discern data that is in there you have to use probability type of algorithms.”

Today, one in every thousand bits stored in a flash memory comes out wrong when the memory is read. With the next generation of flash memory, the number of errors is expected to approach one wrong bit out of every hundred.

For consumers, this  means a music file that they play from their flash storage disk could sound wrong — or a file could get corrupted. To avoid that, flash memory makers have to use error correction, much of which is currently done using software algorithms.

The problem with software-based solutions is that they use digital signal processing circuits that add to the size of the chip, says Wong.

“This is an area where cost is a very sensitive factor,” he says. “So if you can reduce the size of the circuitry, there’s a big benefit there.”

Despite its tiny size, the Lyric LEC contains “a Pentium’s worth of computation,” says Vigoda.

Story continues.

So what if Rambus doesn’t really produce anything tangible these days? We’re hearing the “innovation” business is going really well for the company that recently celebrated its 1,000th patent, and now there’s a nice big windfall in its near future as well. The US International Trade Commission has handed down a ruling agreeing with a previous judgment that NVIDIA infringed on three Rambus patents in the design of its memory controllers, with the ultimate outcome being a ban on importing such infringing goods into the country. Of course, that’s the one thing we’re sure won’t be happening, but NVIDIA will now have to sign up for a license to Rambus’ precious IP portfolio, which might be a tad bit costly given that GeForce, Quadro, nForce, Tesla and Tegra chips are named as being in violation — aside from Ion, that’s pretty much NVIDIA’s whole hardware business.

[Thanks, Marc]

Update: NVIDIA, unsurprisingly, has said it will appeal the ruling. [Thanks, Xero2]

Rambus victorious in patent fight with NVIDIA, can expect neat wad of cash for its troubles originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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