Memory

B&R has selected the Hyperstone S8 Flash Memory Controller for their recently announced X90 mobile automation product line. The X90 family of products are designed for securing mobile control and I/O tasks in demanding environments experienced by industrial and mobile machines.

  Series of high-performance expandable fanless embedded computers announced by ADLINK Technology, features 6th generation Intel Core i7/ i5/ i3 processors (codename Skylake) and the QM170 chipset. 

Last March, the AI program AlphaGo beat Korean Go champion LEE Se-Dol at the Asian board game. "The game was quite tight, but AlphaGo used 1200 CPUs and 56,000 watts per hour, while Lee used only 20 W. If a hardware that mimics the human brain structure is developed, we can operate artificial intelligence with less power," points out Professor YU Woo Jong.

The growing field of spin electronics - spintronics - tells us that electrons spin like a top, carry angular momentum, and can be controlled as units of power, free of conventional electric current. Nonvolatile magnetic memory based on the "spin torques" of these spinning electrons has been recently commercialised as STT-MRAM (spin transfer torque-magnetic random access memory).

The year 2016 is not expected to be a good one for the total memory market and the main culprit is DRAM. Declining shipments of desktop and notebook computers, the biggest users of DRAM, as well as declining tablet PC shipments and slowing growth of smartphone units have created excess inventory and suppliers have been forced to greatly reduce average selling prices in order to move parts, says IC Insights.

Silicon memory chips come in two broad types: volatile memory, such as computer RAM that loses data when the power is turned off, and nonvolatile flash technologies that store information even after we shut off our smartphones. In general, volatile memory is much faster than nonvolatile storage, so engineers often balance speed and retention when picking the best memory for the task. That's why slower flash is used for permanent storage.

The portfolio of memory products for embedded applications has bee expanded at distributor Rutronik with the new line-up of 24nm SLC NAND flash memory products from Toshiba. They are compatible with the widely used Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). New functional requirements increase the demand of embedded memory, for software (boot programs, firmware, embedded OS) and data (including log data).

A report recently released by Yole Développement (Yole) has shown that emerging NVM sales are still moderate, announcing a $53m market in 2015. According to the ‘More than Moore’ market research and strategy consulting company, this market is limited to niche markets due to the limited density available.

Using its 14nm Power Plus (LPP) process, Rambus has announced that it has developed an R+ DDR4 PHY on the GLOBALFOUNDRIES 14-FX ASIC platform.

A scheme to write data into next-gen memory chips has been developed by A*STAR Data Storage Institute researchers. The proposal by Jun Yang and colleagues requires considerably less resources to write data safely into memory—even during a system failure. Non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies are the likely successor to current computer memory devices.