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posted by martyb on Thursday September 01 2016, @10:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-fast-cheap-—-pick-two dept.

A nanotube-based non-volatile RAM product could give Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint some competition:

Fujitsu announced that it has licensed Nantero's carbon nanotube-based NRAM (Non-volatile RAM) and will participate in a joint development effort to bring a 256Gb 55nm product to market in 2018. Carbon nanotubes are a promising technology projected to make an appearance in numerous applications, largely due to their incredible characteristics, which include unmatchable performance, durability and extreme temperature tolerance. Most view carbon nanotubes as a technology far off on the horizon, but Nantero has had working prototypes for several years.

[...] Other products also suffer limited endurance thresholds, whereas Nantero's NRAM has been tested up to 10^12 (1 trillion) cycles. The company stopped testing endurance at that point, so the upper bounds remain undefined. [...] The NRAM carbon nanotubes are 2nm in diameter. Much like NAND, fabs arrange the material into separate cells. NAND employs electrons to denote the binary value held in each cell (1 or 0), and the smallest lithographies hold roughly a dozen electrons per cell. NRAM employs several hundred carbon nanotubes per cell, and the tubes either attract or repel each other with the application of an electrical current, which signifies an "on" or "off" state. NRAM erases (resets) the cells with a phonon-driven technique that forces the nanotubes to vibrate and separate from each other. NRAM triggers the reset process by reversing the current, and it is reportedly more power efficient than competing memories (particularly at idle, where it requires no power at all).

NRAM could be much faster than 3D XPoint and suitable as universal memory for a concept like HP's "The Machine":

NRAM seems to be far faster than XPoint, and could be denser. An Intel Optane DIMM might have a latency of [7-9 µs] (7,000-9,000ns). Micron QuantX XPoint SSDs are expected to have latencies of [10 µs] for reading and [20 µs] for writing; that's 10,000 and 20,000ns respectively. A quick comparison has NRAM at c50ns or less and XPoint DIMMs at 7,000-10,000ns, 140-200 times slower. We might imagine that an XPoint/ReRAM-using server system has both DRAM and XPoint/ReRAM whereas an NRAM-using system might just use NRAM, once pricing facilitates this.

Another company licensing with Nantero is already looking to scale the NRAM down to 28nm.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 01 2016, @06:11PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 01 2016, @06:11PM (#396296) Journal

    Legal adults have a right to read or view any legal material that they want. Anyone else opinion of it is irrelevant.

    Unless the government has a warrant, they have no right to rummage through your physical or digital belongings.

    The government has demonstrated a complete disregard for personal privacy in both stored files and communications. It has also demonstrated that it will gleefully look for any reason to arrest you that it can make up or contrive. Therefore, it seems reasonable that everyone take digital security seriously. If the powers that be don't like it, boo hoo! They brought it on themselves.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @08:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @08:01PM (#396352)

    The government doesn't have any rights whatsoever; it has powers.