In his latest post on The Memory Guy , contributor Ron Neale reviews a novel use for ReRAM cells in which a neural processing system mimics the direction-finding mechanism of a barn owl’s ears. This is based on research performed by CEA-Leti in France, which was recently published in the journal Nature. The potential for the use of the unique characteristics of ReRAMs, PCM and CeRAMs as brain-gates, neuromorphic devices, and in-memory computation has long been recognised. In a paper recent...

During Micron’s May 12 Investor Day Conference the company presented a number of new memory technologies and one compelling new business strategy that The Memory Guy thought were worth sharing. The audience learned of yet-another planar DRAM process node, Micron’s layer count for its next-generation NAND, how a portion of its proprietary SSD controller has been absorbed into the NAND chips, and finally of a new approach to contracts to help manage memory chips’ notorious price swings. 1εnm ...

There’s been a lot of talk in the press for over a year about the chip shortage, but this isn’t something that I have written about in The Memory Guy . My coverage of the shortage has been limited to the investor posts that I write for Smartkarma , and they’re behind a paywall. It’s about time for me to post something here. The shortage is the reason that the world semiconductor market is constantly breaking revenue records. Since December 2020 every month has set a new record: Each month...

For the past year, since ISSCC in February 2021, Samsung has been strongly promoting its “Aquabolt-XL” Processor-In-Memory (PIM) devices. In this two-part post The Memory Guy will explain the Aquabolt-XL architecture, its performance, other companies’ similar devices, and discuss the PIM approach’s outlook for commercial success. Processing in memory is not a new concept. Something that has always charmed engineers is the notion that memories have incredible internal bandwidth that could b...

Both Western Digital (WDC) and Kioxia have announced a contamination issue at the companies’ two Flash Ventures wafer fabrication plants in Yokkaichi and Kitakami. Let’s have a look at what’s been said so far as The Memory Guy gauges how important it will be for these companies and for the industry. WDC was the first to announce the issue, with a brief but helpful statement. According to the WDC announcement : …contamination of certain material used in its manufacturing processes has occ...

During Intel’s latest earnings announcement the company provided information to indicate that 3D XPoint, which Intel sells under the name “Optane”, may have finally reached break-even: It may no longer be selling at a loss. How would The Memory Guy know? Well, in fact, I don’t, but I can make an informed guess. The chart below shows profits for NAND flash makers from 2016 through the most recent quarter. It’s a rough way of comparing major NAND flash manufacturers’ business. As of August...

Perhaps the oldest nonvolatile semiconductor memory type is the ferroelectric memory, which recently celebrated its 68th birthday. FRAM predates flash memory, EEPROM, and even UV-erasable EPROM. It’s even older than mask ROM, which wasn’t invented until 1967! As a matter of introduction to the technology, FRAM, or ferroelectric memory, is a read/write nonvolatile memory technology that performs significantly better than either NAND or NOR flash: It reads and writes faster and at lower pow...