Ailing memory firm Numonyx has turned to Phase-Change Memory (PRAM) as the successor to NAND, and has signed a deal with memory solution provider Virident to provide NAND and PRAM to solidify that bet.
Numonyx is the offspring of a partnership between STMicro and Intel which first tried to bring PRAM to market with the “Alverstone” project in February of 2008. PRAM is an interesting technology that relies on the the curious properties of chalcogenide glass, which changes phases of matter with the application of heat (voltage).
Early attempts at PRAM development defined two states of matter: the first is an amorphous solid, the second is a hard crystalline structure. In the case of the former, the high resistance of the amorphous state indicates a binary 0, and the low-resistance crystalline state represents a binary one. Switching between the two states originally took 5ns, and has only improved over time.
The old partnership between STMicro and Intel was particularly significant as their efforts to improve the PRAM technology yielded two additional states of matter for the chalcogenide glass. This has allowed Numonyx to double the bit density of a single PRAM chip without altering the cost of manufacturing, or increasing the size of the memory. In essence, they can fit 128MB in the space they once fit 64MB.
Other benefits of PRAM include sharply lower volatility, higher reliability, and a relatively low cost of entry to production.
It must again be noted that Numonyx has been on a steady decline brimming with loss and layoffs. The contract with Virident will be used to produce a family of products that cooperates with DRAM to improve the capacity and speed of a server’s system memory.
Other successors to NAND include STT RAM, carbon-resistive memory and Programmable Metallization Cell.
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