Jul 3 2009 10:22AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Jul 3 2009 8:03AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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I’ve written about graphene before. It looks like the single-atom-thick carbon sheets may well be the semiconductor of choice in the future. Now comes news that it’s theoretically possible to trap cobalt dimers (pairs of cobalt atoms) vertically within a hexagonal carbon ring in the graphene and that trapped dimer will exhibit ferromagnetic characteristics. In other words, the cobalt dimer serves as a 2-atom magnetic memory bit contained within a 6-atom framework.

Currently, there are experimental cobalt ferromagnetic memories based on 8nm cobalt nanoparticles (clumps of about 50,000 cobalt atoms), but a cobalt dimer in a graphene hex ring measures much less than 1 nm. You can get the details from Technology Review and from this ...Read More

Jul 1 2009 4:08PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Jim Elliott, VP of Memory Marketing at Samsung Semiconductor must have a pretty tough job. He spoke at last week’s MemCon 09 and his talk was titled “Memory: What it Takes to Turn the Corner.” I knew the memory vendors had it tough, but didn’t realize how tough until Elliott rolled out this slide:

The slide shows that the spot price for Gbit DDR2 memory chips dropped 95% from the beginning of 2007 to the end of 2008. Wow! That’s 95% in two years. What kind of business could survive that sort of price erosion?

Jul 1 2009 10:59AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Note:This blog entry is one of several covering last week’s MemCon 09 conference.

Sometimes, an idea is so blindingly elegant that it needs no marketing spin. That’s what I thought when EasyCo LLC’s CTO Doug Dumitru stepped up to the podium and started to describe his company’s software. It fixes a big problem with NAND Flash memory. This first graph shows the problem:

Sequential reads and writes and random reads work OK and transfer rates scale well with block size. Random writes, on the other hand, do not. However, that’s not the whole story....Read More

Jul 1 2009 10:25AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (7) |
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(Note: Psion officially trademarked the name “NetBook” a while ago and prefers that the term not be used generically but I don’t think the Web community is cooperating.)

Time was, many years ago, any PC that you would really want cost $5000. That statement held true for a good 15 years from the PC’s introduction in 1981 to the mid 1990s. Prices for machines fell, but new features continued to appear so that the price of a well-featured machine stayed around $5K. Then the prices started falling, rapidly. Today, that number’s probably between $500 and $1000 and is likely to fall again because of the subcompact notebook, the diminutive PC that’s everything most people really need in a PC. The graph below, taken from a talk at MemCon 09 given last week by SanDisk Corporation’s Senior Strategic Marketing Manager Anu Murthy, tel...Read More