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Hitting the Wall
By Admin | March 21, 2007
Recently makers of memory chips are looking ahead to a day, not too far off, when technology based on silicon bumps up against the laws of physics and memory can’t be made any smaller, with implications for gadgets like MP3 players and digital cameras.”You get in to the 25-nanometer regime and there may need to be a new structure for nonvolatile memory,” Mike Splinter, chief executive of Applied Materials Inc. the world’s biggest supplier of tools for making microchips.
“I’m quite nervous about this because 25 nanometers is not that far away, and if you have to change a process in a couple generations, then that is really challenging,” Splinter told Reuters in a recent interview.
That would slow the development of things like digital music players and cameras, for which current flash memory — used to store music and images — will not suffice beyond the next couple of years. What will happen then?
Topics: Quad Core Technology, Other Tech News, Quad Core Commentary |