I couldn't sleep.
rll,
I am sorry for jumping on you earlier, but as I understand the current state of affairs your time frame for competing technologies is way off. I have a hard time believing that 12 or 24 months is enough time to dethrone flash memory from its position in the market for large capacity storage in the consumer electronics market.
I downloaded all 153 pages of Ramtron's annual report and tried to wade through it. They are a fabless company with proprietary interests in ferromagnetic RAM (which I understand is different from MRAM) and currently have product out on the market. The advantages of FRAM over flash include greater endurance and rapid computational speed. Additionally, power consumption is superior to flash despite the fact that both are non-volatile. FRAM works by incorporating a magnetic sink/capacitor into the transistor which is able maintain a magnetic polarization (N or S = binary) for a protracted period of time in a manner similar to the way capacitors in flash memory can store electrons (not limited to binary information). The slower time for capacitor discharge and re-injection makes flash too slow for CPU/MPU interaction. For example, FRAM operates at write-speeds of nanoseconds while flash or EEPROM operates at millisecond speeds. Similarly, FRAM endurance is superior at 10 billion read/write cycles versus flash at 10,000 to 100,000 cycles.
If we assume that FRAM can be produced in densities allowing for similar storage capacity as compared to flash the only impediment to FRAM is cost. The report states that FRAM can be manufactured with standard CMOS processes, but does not clarify at what cost.
Despite flash's reported disadvantages it is clear that the currently available flash architectures (NAND, NOR, DINOR,...) are suitable for consumer applications such as digital cameras, mp3 players, handhelds,...where they are not subject to highly repetitious read/write cycling. Similarly, if cell size is comparable between the technologies, flash may have advantages because of progress in multilevel (stepwise electric potential) technology. In fact, SNDK shareholders have witnessed this rapid evolution over the past 12 months.
The Ramtron Annual Report clearly states...
The company considers its FRAM products to be competitive with existing nonvolatile memory products such as EEPROM, Battery Backed Static RAM ("BBSRAM") and NonVolatile RAM ("NVRAM") products in low-density applications. Athough nonvolatile Flash memory products are important in the high -density memory product market, the Company's products do not currently compete in that market.
This is the reason I originally questioned the validity of your statements here.
Ausdauer |
