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Technology Stocks : Micromem Technologies ***MAG-RAM*** ( MMTI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mani1 who wrote (2)	5/3/1999 4:15:00 PM
From: wily	Respond to of 95

Excellent article! Thankyou, Mani. Rather timely, too, seeing as it just came out today. It gives me a time perspective that I didn't have before, (and that you seem to have been right about). I need to study this article and the Scientific American article some more, but it seems that the EE-Times article makes no mention of the "third" technology in the SA article which is being developed by Lienau at Micromem -- the one based on the Hall Effect. Johnosn (who handed a similar design over to Honeywell) thinks it could have a commercial impact in a couple years in the area of EEPROM's and Flash Memory. Granted, that's a far cry from becomming a substitute for main memory. Those uncertainties may leave an opening for a third approach that has less money behind it, but more history. Edwin Hall discovered 120 years ago that a current moving through a thin film is deflected to one side by a magnet. Lienau's "magram" device exploits this effect, as does a similar design of Johnson's called a Hall effect hybrid memory. Theoretically, both designs should be easier to manufacture than spin valves or tunnel junctions. They tolerate heat well. And Johnson notes that his design requires only half as many etching steps as DRAMs. Moreover, "unlike all other memories, [magram] can be deposited on glass--perhaps even plastic--instead of single-crystal silicon," Sadwick claims as he shows, during a visit by Scientific American, a glass slide covered in gold wires leading to a one-millimeter-square array of Hall effect sensors. That versatility should allow the memory to be cheap even if it cannot shrink to the submicron cell sizes of its competitors, he argues. With single cells already working, Sadwick says, "I see no reason why we can't get eight-bit commercial samples this year." Johnson, meanwhile, has turned over his design to Honeywell, which has built one-micron test devices on gallium arsenide. "They can write bits in eight nanoseconds," he reports. The next generation, he says, will be smaller, faster and made atop silicon, the industry standard for microchips. wily

To: Mani1 who wrote (2)	5/4/1999 9:50:00 PM
From: wily	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 95

Mani, From the Scientific American article: In the near term, "we would just be happy to get a toehold in the market," comments Mark B. Johnson, a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory. "That could probably happen within two years," he says, if magnetic memories can shoulder out Flash RAM and so-called EEPROMs, the two leading forms of permanent semiconductor memory. "They are vulnerable because they are really slow: writing data can take tens of microseconds, and erasures take up to a second," Johnson observes. Both kinds of chips require high power and wear out after less than a million write operations. "Even so, that is a $5-billion-a-year market," he adds. Isn't that a rather compelling number: $5 Billion market and only 2 companies going after it -- Honeywell and Micromem, both possibly in production within 2 years? wily

To: Mani1 who wrote (2)	5/17/1999 4:24:00 PM
From: wily	Respond to of 95

Message 9568154 ______________________________________________________________________ Hitachi Unveils New Generation Computer Chip LONDON (Reuters) - Japanese electronics company Hitachi Ltd (NYSE:HIT - news). said Monday it has developed a new-generation chip which will lead to smaller, faster computers, telephones and electronic systems. The PLEDM chip will start appearing in products by 2005, Hitachi said. ''The PLEDM development puts Hitachi at the forefront of chip technology,'' Sachio Ishioka of Hitachi Europe told a press briefing. The technology behind the PLEDM chip was developed by scientists from Hitachi and Cambridge University. The new chip will allow instant recording and accessing of a massive amount of information, Hitachi said, and will eliminate the need for current storage devices like computer hard disks. PLEDM is smaller, faster and consumes less energy than current Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chips. According to Ishioka, DRAM systems are reaching design limits, making further progress toward more miniaturization and increased performance difficult. The PLEDM chip will allow a new wave of improvements to be made. According to Hitachi, conventional DRAM chips consist of one transistor and one capacitator cell. The new PLEDM cell uses two transistors, and can be manufactured with standard silicon processes. Hitachi declined to reveal how much it had invested in the new chip.