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Samsung looks at hiking PRAM output

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CIOL Bureau
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SEOUL: Targeting mobile phone handsets and other battery-operated applications in a big way, South Korean major Samsung Electronics has kicked off manufacture of a 512-Mbit phase-change random access memory. The company is looking at effecting high volume manufacture of the device.

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It is being foreseen that Samsung would look at moving ahead of Swiss major Numonyx BV by getting into high volume production.

Memory specialist Numonyx, a joint venture between Intel and STMicroelectronics, and Samsung believe that, though the technology has taken a long time to develop, the non-volatile memory will provide superior density to flash memory and scalability along with high performance and low power consumption.

Samsung expects to sail ahead of Numonyx through mass production of the device. The company has said that by using phase-change random access memory (PRAM), the battery life of a handset can be extended over 20 percent, compared with other memory options.

It has in the meantime also announced that the new 512-Mbit PRAM can erase 64-kilowords in 80 milliseconds, more than 10 times faster than NOR flash memory. In 5-Mbytes data blocks can be erased and rewritten approximately seven-times faster than in NOR flash, it added. The device is being produced using a 60-nanometer manufacturing process.

The company said that finer technology nodes will be applied in future-generations of PRAM to speed up commercial adoption. Sei-Jin Kim, vice president, mobile memory planning and enabling group, Memory Division, Samsung Electronics, the company would try and make it one of its core memory products in the future.

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