Memory

Hynix and Ovonyx Joining Forces

PRAM development gets hot

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

2nd of October 2007, 13:10 GMT

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Hynix Semiconductor just announced that it has signed an agreement with a number of rival companies, including Ovonyx, in order to develop a new breed of non-volatile flash memory modules that are supposed to bring greater data storage densities as well as faster access to information. The new breed of flash memory is called phase change memory and it may be the next big thing for NAND storage solutions manufacturing companies.

In a joint statement,

the two hardware manufacturing companies said that they will develop the new type of memory which is well known under the name of phase change random access memory, or PRAM for short. The new memory breed should bring much faster data processing speeds as well as the ability to store data like a traditional non-volatile flash memory solution even when there is no external power source. When comparing the PRAM and flash memory capabilities, the new breed of memory is clearly the winner as it is able to rewrite data 30 times faster, while also having a much longer lifespan.

Another good point in favor of this new technology is that it is much easier to produce than NOR flash memory, as Samsung stated sometime ago when it revealed a working PRAM prototype that could store 512MB of data on a single chip. As the advantages of the new memory type are clear, a number of important hardware manufacturers are already interested in that product and companies like Samsung, IBM, Qimonda, STMicroelectronics, and Intel are actively developing phase-change memory products.

The Hynix Semiconductor and Ovonyx partnership is not the first of its kind, as IBM and its partners developed a PRAM based product that can write data 500 times faster than currently available NAND flash based memories, all this by using only a fraction of the power drawn by the older technology. According to the news site infoworld, Ovonyx says that phase change random access memory could be used as a cheaper alternative to DRAM, embedded as well as flash memory solutions.

TAGS:

Hynix | PRAM | phase change | memory | NAND

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