Elpida takes Memristor ”ReRAM” to market in 2013

Maybe the memory technologies DRAM and NAND are about to be replaced? Competing technologies are coming next year and in the form of HP Memristor, but now Elpida is also getting ready for the Memristor technology with what it calls ReRAM.

There are currently two mainly kinds of memory technologies beuing used in electronics; DRAM (Dynamic Random-access Memory) that is used for RAM with low capacity and high speeds. NAND on the other hand has high capacity and low speed. Most technologies that have been able to combine the two have been mainly theoretic, but next year we will actually have one of them on the market. HP has been talking about its Memristor technoloy to become real in 2013 and it then targets NAND technology. HP has no plans to make memories of its own though.

Hynix is already a safe bet for HP’s Memristor and Samsung has shown interest. Elpida says it has developed ReRAM (Resistive Random-access memory) that builds on HP’s memristor, but most likely sports a competing technology. The experimental test circuit is at 64 Mb (8 MB) and uses 50nm technology, and is fully operational.

Also ReRAM will focus on competing with NAND, and offers durability of 1,000,000) write cycles. A substantial improvement over NAND at 20nm that breaks after 5,000. ReRAM will also have a write time of 10ns, which is about the same as modern RAM technology.

Next year Elpida will begin mass production of ReRAM circuits at 30nm at 1 Gb (128 MB) density, and collide with Hynix that is planning to release a circuit with the same density, also based on the Memristor. While both are based on HP’s technology, the manufacturing, development and properties of the memory different.

While these are pretty low densities, the new memory technology has been one of the hotter talks in the IT industry in the last couple of years, and it is finally becomin real. It is not until 2014 or 2015 that HP expects the Memristor technology really start competing with DRAM and NAND technologies, but also SRAM that is used as cache in various semiconductors.