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Hardware Technology

Fabs Now Manufacturing Carbon Nanotube Memory, Which Could Replace NAND and DRAM 67

Posted by Soulskill from the still-waiting-on-my-isolinear-chips dept.
Lucas123 writes: Nantero, the company that invented carbon nanotube-based non-volatile memory in 2001 and has been developing it since, has announced that seven chip fabrication plants are now manufacturing its Nano-RAM (NRAM) wafers and test chips. The company also announced aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and Schlumberger Ltd., the world's largest gas and oil exploration and drilling company, as customers seeking to use its chip technology. The memory, which can withstand 300 degrees Celsius temperatures for years without losing data, is natively thousands of times faster than NAND flash and has virtually infinite read/write resilience. Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs using DDR4 interfaces. NRAM has the potential to create memory that is vastly more dense that NAND flash, as its transistors can shrink to below 5 nanometers in size, three times more dense than today's densest NAND flash. At the same time, NRAM is up against a robust field of new memory technologies that are expected to challenge NAND flash in speed, endurance and capacity, such as Phase-Change Memory and Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM).
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Fabs Now Manufacturing Carbon Nanotube Memory, Which Could Replace NAND and DRAM More

Fabs Now Manufacturing Carbon Nanotube Memory, Which Could Replace NAND and DRAM

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  • of those

    terabytes of data in my pocket

  • Stupid nitpick (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Schlumberger isn't an exploration and drilling company, it's an oilfield services company. They don't drill the oil themselves, they sell technology, data and engineering services to people who do.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mlts ( 1038732 )

      They also tend to know what they are doing, so this does give some passing credibility to this project.

      I've seen a lot of things come and go, be it Tamarak's holographic storage, InPhase's holo storage, bubble memory, digital paper, optical tape drives, and so on. Since this has actual companies signing on, this appears to be more than just hype.

      Time will tell though. Lots of innovations have been announced and discussed, and lots have wound up long forgotten.

      • You have to be careful though because I've seen a lot of companies over the years say "Giant Corporation X is testing our product." And what that means is that someone at Giant Corporation X said "yes I'll take a sample and evaluate it." That doesn't mean they are investing any serious resources in integrating it into their roadmap. I've even seen it used when all they had was an informal meeting over drinks only to have a press release pop up "Company Y working with us!"

    • Schlumberger has a bunch of divisions, they aren't just oilfield. A friend of mine works in their IT support division, he's contracted to do IT security for a hospital.

  • Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Guy Harris ( 3803 ) <guy@alum.mit.edu> on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @06:43PM (#49826409)

    The summary says "Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs using DDR4 interfaces."

    TFA says:

    Nantero doesn't plan on producing its own NRAM drives, which will initially be marketed for purposes similar to solid-state drive (SSD) gum sticks or internal memory boards. But it will license its intellectual property to companies to develop their own product. Nantero's engineers are still in the process of creating chip designs for the memory wafers.

    (emphasis mine), which is, err, umm, the exact opposite of "Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs" (or even "Nantero plans on creating gum stick SSDs").

    As for what's being fabbed:

    "So those fabs have been and are indeed producing large numbers of wafers and chips," said Greg Schmergel, CEO of Nantero. "They are sample chips/test chips in preparation for mass production, which requires the product designs to be completed."

    Schmergel said it will likely take a couple more years before NRAM drives begin rolling off production lines.

    so, whilst this is better than "we've constructed a 4-bit chip in the lab and, yes, it does reliably store 4 bits of data", let's wait a couple of years before we get too excited.

  • To use with my quantum computer, powered by nuclear fusion reactor.

  • I think AMD is going to beat them to the punch with HBM and module stacking [amd.com] and is coming out on their next gen videocards, especially since DDR5 is just starting to roll out to the PC market for generic modules. It'll be a hard slog for them to push it in anywhere unless it's price competitive, or it's in highly specialized devices at least in the short term. I'd say 10 years before it rolls out to the general public, for public use. And they'll probably be bought up by someone else in the short term.

  • three times more dense than today's

    So according to Moore's law we are about 2 years away from having these in everyday electronics?

    Ps /. Mobile is really broken. I had to spoof a desktop browser to post this. Current vrowser: opera mobile 29.0

    • I use mobile firefox and noscript turning javascript off. I also have slashdot set to "classic" mode (I remember whenSlashdot 2.0 got as much whining as Beta). Works like a charm.

  • Will this make for a single memory space computer? (Score:3)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @09:46PM (#49827405)

    One where there is no differentiation between "disk" and "RAM"?

  • Interesting process (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drhank1980 ( 1225872 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @10:47PM (#49827605)

    Looking at the pictures in the slides this looks very similar to a carbon nanotube memory process I worked on at my last job (we might have even been licensing some of the IP from these guys). We were looking for a way to shrink our microcontroller die by moving the EEPROM cells up into the metallization stacks. An additional benefit to this memory was that we would be able to increase the EEPROM memory size 2x (with a second layer of cells) with the addition of just 5 more masking layers and almost no increase in die size.

    The process I worked on was nowhere near volume production when I left; but I do know we did have completely functional die with carbon nanotube memory. The one part of the process that was most challenging was dealing with the carbon nanotube spin on process. It took forever to get the right thickness uniformity and once you had it at the correct thickness you were rewarded with a material that had filled in your lithography alignment structures to the point they were almost worthless for the next patterning step. It was pretty cool tech to work on, I am glad it looks like somebody is getting it to work.

  • The density of data stored in plane goes with the inverse square of the element size (just a quick remark)

    • Yes, thank you. That was bugging the crap out of me. 3x feature shrink = 9x more devices per area.

  • ... this will translate into a product that I can use in less than 20, 30 years? Or will become another of the military toys we civilians will never know are there?
  • ... if you raise the operating temperature a couple of hundred Kelvin, then quantum docoherence [wikipedia.org] and environmental scattering [inspirehep.net] are going to play a role, meaning that information held in any one of the cells may simply vanish by "leaking" into a coupled environment. A little bit of thermal background radiation is enough to set such processes into motion.

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