To keep this thread from looking like an EV car club, back to OUMs. Just something to muse about.
Some data to help us understand the OUM potential is buried in a WSJ article today (copied in part below). The article is interesting in it's own right - Mead sounds like an Ovshinsky kind of guy, really. However, the only pertinent data is: "Today the smallest transistor is .18 microns." Remember that the Ovonic Memory cell consists of the controllable Ovonic resistor element, which can have dimensions limited only by lithographic techniques (this side of atomic dimensions, at least) plus a transistor. So, if transistors can now be less than 0.2 micron in size, the Ovonic memory cell can be not much larger.
It appears that, with state-of-the-art lithography, the whole Ovonic memory cell could now be fit into a rectangle of equivalent size to roughly a 0.3 micron square. Then the area needed is only about 0.1 sq micron. Since there are 10,000 microns in a centimeter, then about one billion OUM memory cells could fit into a square centimeter. Of course, a network of connecting wires is needed as well; but I think these can be on other layers of the chip.
April 23, 1999 Tech Center
Professor Carver Mead Wins
Largest Prize for Invention
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO -- A microelectronics pioneer whose early work on
minuscule transistors helped power the information age won the world's single largest award for invention on Thursday night.
Carver Mead, a professor of engineering and applied science at the California Institute of Technology, was awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize in a ceremony at the city's Exploratorium museum.
"I was very surprised," Mr. Mead said. "The previous awards were all given to people who had one big blockbuster patent. And I don't have one of those, so it never occurred to me that I was a candidate."
Mr. Mead's innovations also include a standard amplifying device used in microwave communication systems, which people use every day when making telephone calls or dialing into the Internet, and a hearing aid powered by a digital microchip.
"They made a video where they interviewed a number of people that had those hearing aids, and it makes you cry," said Mr. Mead, 65 years old. "These people are saying, 'This thing has changed my life. I can hear my grandchildren now.' That's very satisfying."
But Mr. Mead is best known for his work on transistors, a project that he began in 1968 on a suggestion from Gordon Moore of Integrated Electronics -- later Intel Corp.
"Moore's Law" -- that computer chips would continue to double in power
every 18 months while remaining the same size and price -- has since become a truism in the computer industry. But in 1970, Mr. Mead's forecast that the transistor could be reduced to .15 microns was revolutionary.
By comparison, a human hair is 20 microns in diameter and a wavelength of invisible light is half a micron, Mr. Mead explained in an interview Thursday.
"I was able to show that we were nowhere near the limits," he said. "It was pretty counterculture at the time to take a position like that."
Yet his forecast has nearly come true: Today the smallest transistor is .18 microns.
Mr. Mead, who lives in Woodside, Calif., said he plans to use the prize money to help support companies that have been launched by his former students.
(remainder of article snipped) |
