China has developed and manufactured its first phase change memory that has a capacity of 8 Mb according to a report by the official Chinese news agency Xinhua.
China obviously wishes to manufacture its own memory, but having been late to the game they decided to skip DRAM and go directly to phase change memory, which is widely regarded as a successor to DRAM as dimensions continue to shrink.
The phase change memory was manufactured jointly by Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and Microchip Technology Inc., according to the Xinhua report.
China is not alone in going with phase change memory. Samsung of Korea is also fabbing phase change memory and they have already reached densities of 128 Mb on a 90 nm process, while Numonyx, which Micron has acquired, has been working on a 1 Gb device fabbed in 45 nm.
Phase change memory holds great promise replacing both flash and DRAM in the future, but for the time being it is mainly used as a replacement for NOR-flash in cell phones.S|A
Mads Ølholm
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