Memory companies Numonyx and Ovonyx say they have entered into a license agreement for memory products under Ovonyx’s patents and intellectual property relating to phase change memory (PCM) technology. As flash memory and DRAM encounter increasing scaling challenges in the face of shrinking chip geometries, PCM is considered a viable alternative for emerging generations of commercial, high-volume semiconductor memory.
“While PCM represents a significant opportunity to extend the benefits of non-volatile memory to segments currently served by flash memory, it also opens new opportunities in areas current memory technologies aren’t able to go,” says Ed Doller, chief technology officer at Numonyx.
PCM technology offers faster write and erase speeds through its capability for byte-write in either direction (avoiding the need to erase a block to write a bit), higher cycling endurance and better scaling performance than conventional Flash or DRAM memory. Relative to DRAM, PCM eliminates the refresh power by retaining data without power.
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