Samsung and Numonyx Work on Specifications for PCM

Samsung Electronics has been a leading innovator in the memory industry for some time now, with the company continuously looking for new ways to improve performance, energy efficiency and provide customers with the very latest solutions. On that note, the South Korean company has just announced a collaboration with Numonyx for the joint development of market specifications of Phase Change Memory (PCM) products. According to the two players, this technology should deliver an increased performance and low-power demands to makers of high-end mobile applications, embedded systems and high-end computing devices.

“Our joint efforts with Numonyx will enable a more secure path for introducing PCM into the mobile environment,” SeiJin Kim, vice president, mobile memory technology planning and enabling, Samsung Electronics, said. “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,” he added.

Phase Change Memory is said to provide an impressive performance with high read and write speeds, while using less power than conventional NOR and NAND flash memory. In addition, upcoming PCM-based devices are expected to provide a faster programming ability, compared with other types of memory, while the built-in, RAM-like features will enable the programming changes to be made alternatively, bit by bit, a more efficient solution than having to erase entire blocks of information. This technology is expected to become available in devices that will surface sometime next year, with both companies planning to complete the specifications by the end of this year.

“This is a significant milestone for both the development of PCM and for the overall memory market,” Brian Harrison, president and CEO of Numonyx, shared. “The collaboration between two memory industry leaders, Numonyx and Samsung, is helping to provide the kind of direction and clarity that is often needed when new technologies are introduced. The common specifications will enable chipset vendors and others in the ecosystem to standardize and more easily support the delivery of a new generation of memory technology that will benefit not only handset OEMs, but also manufacturers of embedded systems and high-end computing devices, and their customers.”