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Technology Stocks : Energy Conversion Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fred whitridge who wrote (3725)	6/12/1999 10:45:00 AM
From: Ray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8393

Fred, I looked up and partially read the patent for the "PRAM" memory elements you mentioned. (Does the firm have a web site? - a stock symbol?) This is a very informative patent. A bit too much for a GMR layman like myself, so I only partly understood what I read. I feel about this device the same way I feel about all the various magnetic-based memory chip elements I have read about. Here is my post copied from Yahoo ENER about a hall effect element: <<Al: MMTI by: Ray_Bowman 1495 of 1506 Thanks for the patent number for the mag-ram memory cell. I read through the patent quickly -- just to get an overview of the work. I have the same general comments about it as I have for the other MRAM devices: (1 ) it is much more complicated -- conceptually, physically, and to fabricate -- than the resistive phase-change memory cell of ECD. (2) it provides only one on state rather than the multiple (say, 16) states provided by the OUM memory cell. (3) the OUM cell works better as it is scaled down; not true, I think, for the mag-ram cell (but I hope someone else will confirm or deny this as I am not yet sure). As for the market cap for MMTI -- yes, hmmm. Tends to confirm my belief that ENER is presently one of the most underrated companies ever. >> However, the PRAM element does, according to the patent, work better as it is scaled down. All of these memory elements, including ours probably, are too complicated as real, physical devices to reliably predict which will prove best (otherwise, there would not be so much effort being spent on all of them!). The outcome depends too much on excrutiating technical minutia - the details that the devil resides in. Even the OUM, with its relative simplicity, has subtle complications: Does the temperature required to change the phase of the resistive material cause a diffusion, over time, of the substrate atoms into the resistive layer, changing its characteristics too much? Due to expansion stresses, does the repeated temperature cycling loosen the adhesion of the resistive layer to the substrate? These are just examples of the complexities inherent to making electronic chips of various kinds, and the large number of cycles (10^14) reported for the OUM elements indicates that these particular examples are not very limiting. (However, these examples may explain why the cycling capability is not infinite.) My sense of the scene is that the OUM chips are much closer to commercial realization than the other competing high speed, high density, non-battery, non-volatile, inexpensive memory chips. Tyler seems to be saying that commercialization is near - months, years?