News in View: Hitachi makes chip breakthrough

Hitachi's Cambridge research lab is pioneering a technology which could supersede conventional DRAM and Flash memory.

Dr David Williams, senior researcher at Hitachi's Cambridge lab, claims the company's latest Pledm design has major advantages over the traditional memory model. "The Pledm is a very new type of transistor structure using fairly common silicon technologies, but it overcomes a number of the problems that are inherent in DRAM and Flash Memory.

"The problem is that the structure needs a very large capacitor and when you are scaling down the DRAM structure for future technology levels it is difficult to scale that down," he added.

According to Williams, Pledm chips will reach multi-Gigabit performance levels in five years' time. "We see the Pledm-type structure as really opening up a new type of design where we can, at that multi-Gigabit level, take a rather large step into reducing the device size and increase chip capacity at the same time," he said.

According to Ashim Pal, analyst at the Meta Group, multi-Gigabit chips are set to have a major impact on the market - particularly in mobile devices. It is this type of chip, said Pal, which will allow mobile handsets to hold enough memory to store complex operating systems and run memory-hungry applications.

Hitachi's Williams added: "It also has a long storage time, so it's comparable with future flash memories for storage of information in mobile communications and smartcards."

See the full interview in our Processors Channel http://www.silicon.com/a34057