New Memory Provided By Samsung - Numonyx Collaboration

New kinds of memory are being developed, and improved, all the time. Samsung, long recognized as a leader in memory technology (have you checked your video card memory lately?) is partnering with less known company Numonyx to bring a new, and very fast memory to the technical world.

While the recession has seen a couple of memory manufacturers cutting back or ceasing production of certain lines, Samsung seems to be going full speed ahead, and is quickly becoming the company that industry looks to for innovation in memory design.

from Tech Connect

Flash memory experts Samsung Electronics and Numonyx have decided to team up and develop market specifications for Phase Change Memory (PCM) products. Phase Change is set to be the next great thing in non-volatile memory technology as it would be able to deliver higher (up to 30 times higher) speeds and support significantly (at least 10 times) more write cycles than both NOR and NAND flash memory.

By working together, the two companies hope to create common hardware and software compatibility for PCM products and thus simplify designs and shorten development time. Samsung and Numonyx are developing common specifications - or ‘pin for pin’ hardware and software compatibility - for mobile, embedded and other computing applications supporting the JEDEC LPDDR2 Low Power Memory Device Standard.

“Our joint efforts with Numonyx will enable a more secure path for introducing PCM into the mobile environment,” said SeiJin Kim, vice president, mobile memory technology planning and enabling, Samsung Electronics. “We anticipate that PCM will eventually be a major addition to our family of memory products, one that will nicely compliment our other mobile memory solutions and ultimately increase our leadership in the industry.”

The common specifications between the two companies are expected to be completed this year, so as to enable Samsung and Numonyx to have compliant devices available next year. Samsung has this month started mass production of PRAM (phase change RAM) chips, with the first products providing 512Mb of space.

Each generation of memory production shrinks the footprint, and makes things faster. It is truly amazing how incredibly cheap RAM, as well as other types of memory, have become. When I first purchased memory for my first PC, a 286 operating at 12 MHz, RAM was individual chips, put into a circuit board, and 9 of them (most PCs used a error correcting bit) totalling 1 MB cost $100 – and that was at a local computer expo show, making it a great deal. I just purchased 4 GB of memory thousands of times faster (DDR2) for $45, and there is a rebate of $15 on it. Progress indeed. The cost differential is astounding, and other than CPU production quantities, one of the reasons why computers have become commodity devices for most, and so incredibly inexpensive.

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