NiceGuy:
<<Looks like they've been unmasked!!!>>
Hoo! Haa! ...They wish!<vbg>
Mr. Lammers suggests an alternative theory:
'Not as mature'
Intel Corp. has endorsed Ovonic memory, a form of chalcogenic material, but Buss said Ovonic memory arrays will require four additional mask levels, "and Ovonic is not as mature a technology as FRAM." Similarly, Motorola Inc.'s magnetoresistive RAM, or MRAM, has yet to be proved cost-effective.
eet.com
But the really interesting bit from his article is the following:
TI is developing chips with a combination of on-chip SRAM and on-board FRAM in order to deal with the challenges presented by the destructive read characteristic of FRAM. A read requires a change in the polarization state of the ferroelectric stack. After the read, the data must be written back, which increases the number of write cycles over the lifetime of the chip. TI rates FRAM's write endurance at 1014, one order of magnitude less than either SRAM or embedded DRAM.
"There was a significant amount of work that had to be done by TI and Ramtron to solve some of the unique challenges presented by FRAM materials," Buss said. "One of them was the write-erase endurance. We had to find ways to work around it by combining FRAM with small SRAM modules, and keeping some of the heavier write cycles in SRAM.
This suggests that the "Holy Grail Patent" TI was granted apparently came a cropper, as one of its claimed benefits was the elimination of the destructive read.
The solution TI is using sounds like it has borrowed heavily from Ramtron's original claim to EE Fame - the LEGENDARY EDRAM cached SRAM/DRAM combo design whose 4Mb incarnation refuses to "die." I mean who could possibly know more about embedding SRAM in a memory core? <vbg>
But this destructive read "problem" is still troubling. Why isn't there a solution using some sort of teeny-weeny "electron proximity detector" [OPP:Owl Patent Pending] circuit with enough juice to detect the state but not enough to change it? Dadburned single electron cells! And where are all the LEGENDARY MEMS folk with their nano optical/shape shifting sensor thingys when you need them!!?<Hoo>
I just don't get it.
Why the heck would sensing the state of polarity be so tough? After all the materials and process problems they have over come, you'd think that a sensor that could tell you whether the "light" is on or off would be a punt.<Hoo><Hoo>
Oh well, there's always another licensee... I'll wager the IBMers have something in their patent closet to fix this. ...Assuming you can get them out of the "Tower" and into the vault to look for it! <Hoo><Hoo>
0|0
P.S. Just parking this link to some other links:
messages.yahoo.com
...Can't remember why any more.<vbg> |
