EDN’s 20th annual Innovation Awards Finalists
-- EDN, February 18, 2010
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&& PREVIOUS FINALIST | MAIN | NEXT FINALIST >> Category: Innovator of the Year Finalist: Numonyx Alverstone phase-change-memory design team  Current market demands are testing the limitations of flash and DRAM memory usage in consumer products and the enterprise. As increased numbers of computing devices such as multifunction cell phones and mobile Internet devices are brought to market, additional capacity is needed to store and process increased amounts of information with less power. Additionally, as Internet server applications such as Web search and advertising are built to offer faster search online processing and faster response times for consumers, servers must be equipped to handle the extreme increase in “near memory” storage needed to maintain development of these applications. To address this burgeoning issue, the Numonyx research and development team developed “Alverstone,” the memory industry’s first commercially available device utilizing Phase Change Memory technology—the most significant memory advancement in 40 years. Phase Change Memory blends the best attributes commonly associated with NOR-type flash memory, NAND-type flash memory, and RAM or EEpROM. The result is a bit-alterable, nonvolatile technology with high read and write speeds and high endurance capabilities. Because PCM is powered by physical state change, not electron storage, shrinking lithographies do not present an issue. In fact, smaller lithographies are better suited for PCM because there is less material to alter between states, which dramatically decreases the power required to change a PCM bit. Consistent reliability and lower power give PCM technology an advantage over today’s memory technologies as it scales to sub-45-nm manufacturing nodes, well beyond where NOR and NAND can be expected to reach in the future. The “RAM like” functionality and low-power nonvolatility of PCM offer device manufacturers a unique solution to storage and higher-performance computing problems today, achieving much of the promise of “storage class memory.” Its scalability and low inherent low cost structure offer a scaling path beyond NOR and NAND in the future as these electron storage based memories encounter limitations. Alverstone represents the first step toward commercialization of the Phase Change Memory technology and is the result of nine years of extensive research and development to bring this significantly new memory concept and storage physics to production capability. |
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