Numonyx BV is on track to offer manufacturers with samples of its 1-Gbit phase-change random access memory (PCRAM) in the first quarter of 2010.

Numonyx will be  presenting details of the memory, implemented in a 45-nm manufacturing process technology, at the International Electron Devices Meeting in Baltimore this week and at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February 2010. But even as the ISSCC presentation is taking place, or soon after, favored customers will be receiving the nonvolatile memory.

"The chip we are presenting is a full specification product. It is meant to be in production in 2010; samples in the first quarter of 2010," Paolo Cappelletti, vice president of technology development at Numonyx, told EE Times.

The idea of a dense memory with better than one-million write cycling endurance that retains data when power is removed has been a goal since before the days of the dynamic RAM. The chalcogenide phase-change approach to a solid-state device has been a long time coming to market, having been researched by Stanford Ovshinsky at Energy Conversion Devices Inc. in the 1960s.

The 1-Gbit PCRAM could allow Numonyx to recapture the lead in a race against Samsung. Numonyx was the first company to offer samples of the chalcogenide phase-change memory, which promises to replace DRAM and flash memory in certain applications. Numonyx has been shipping samples of a 128-Mbit PCRAM built on a 90-nm process since 2008.

By: DocMemory
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