Elpida announced the development of a high-speed 64Mb non-volatile resistance memory (ReRAM) prototype using a 50nm process. The device was jointly developed with the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), a Japanese-funded public institution.
Elpida will conduct further ReRAM development with Sharp Corporation, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST, another Japanese public institution) and the University of Tokyo.
It’s encouraging to see that Elpida still has its eye on projects into 2013 and beyond. The company is rumored to be working feverishly to find ways to stay in business through this year. Today’s DRAM market is a challenging one!
NAND and DRAM researchers have been very good at pushing out the inevitable brick wall that will eventually halt scaling today’s technologies, and The Memory Guy would not be surprised to see them continue to push it out some more. Even so, these companies must spend considerable resources investigating the successors to current technologies.
Today it looks like NAND will scale right down to 10nm. Future developments may push it past that. Until that brick wall is reached, there’s no reason to anticipate that any of today’s alternative technologies has a significant lead over any other, since an awful lot will change before we get there.
A new technology may even come from nowhere and become competitive with them. I’m not placing bets on any one technology, and neither are most memory chip makers, who are dabbling with a number of alternatives.
There’s has a free downloadable white paper on PCM and other advanced technologies on the Objective Analysis home page. This white paper explains how and why future technologies will displace existing memories.
