Bridge Player
OUM is a non-volatile memory technology that is licensed to Intel and ST Microelectronics. They have been working on making it manufacturable for about 3 years now. There are not any chips announced yet, but things seem to be going very well, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear an announcement this year of a chip ready to sell. I copied and pasted most of this from the heading on this thread...
Ovonic Unified Memory (OUM) utilizes a proprietary phase change chalcogenide alloy to store non-volatile information economically and with excellent solid state memory properties. A computer utilizing OUM could be turned off, then turned back on immediately, or 10 years later, and be started right up where it left off. These OUM computers would not be subject to critical data loss when the system hangs up or when power is abruptly lost as are present day computers using DRAM a/o SRAM.
With instant on operation, OUM computer users would not have to wait for the system to boot up and reload DRAM. OUM requires fewer steps in an IC manufacturing process resulting in reduced cycle times, fewer defects, and greater manufacturing flexibility. The operating speed of OUM memory technology is similar to DRAM and many orders of magnitude faster than Flash write. Also, unlike conventional Flash memory, OUM memory is randomly accessible for memory addressing. Further, Flash memory wears out (fails) after 100,000 write cycles, while the OUM memory state can be written greater than 10 trillion times, making this memory useful for program storage (Flash) as well as general purpose interactive (DRAM) data storage memory.
OUM has direct applications in all products presently using solid state memory, including desktop, laptop, and palm computers, cell phones, graphics-3D rendering, GPS, video conferencing, multi-media, Internet networking and interfacing, entertainment, digital TV, telecom, PDA, digital voice recorders, modems, DVD, networking (ATM), Ethernet, and pagers. OUM offers a way to realize full system-on-a-chip capability through integrating unified memory, linear, and logic on the same silicon chip. |
