
Nantero Exits Stealth: Using Carbon Nanotubes for Non-Volatile Memory - Symmetry
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9314/nantero-exits-stealth-using-carbon-nanotubes-for-nonvolatile-memory-with-dram-performance-unlimited-endurance
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Animats
What "stealth"? Even the article says Nantero has been working on this for
over a decade. They and Lockheed had a NVRAM back in 2008. It was sent into
space in 2009, along with a memory tester. It's radiation-hard, so it has
space applications.

The technology seems to work fine. Manufacturing cost is apparently the
problem. Nantero has been trying to fab the things in something close to a
standard fab. They may eventually succeed at getting the cost down, but
they've been struggling financially.

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ghshephard
The article could have been improved with a quick round of editing,
particularly for an Anandtech article - some of the exposition was rather
breathless (not to mention inaccurate). For example:

 _The write /erase endurance is practically infinite as independent university
study has shown Nantero’s NRAM technology to have over 10^11 P/E cycles,(for
your information, 10^11 translates to 100 billion). _

First, 10^11 P/E cycle and "practically infinite" aren't really two concepts I
would associate with each other when discussing RAM.

And second, an Anandtech article explaining what 10^11 means? If I have
trouble with that concept, about 98%+ of their articles would be completely
over my head.

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morrad
> First, 10^11 P/E cycle and "practically infinite" aren't really two concepts
> I would associate with each other when discussing RAM.

I think their point of comparison for this statistic is NAND flash. 10^11 is
much better than current NAND P/E cycles ( < 10^9 I believe).

~~~
StephanTLavavej
It's roughly 3000 cycles. Yes, three thousand. See:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/7237/samsungs-vnand-hitting-
th...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7237/samsungs-vnand-hitting-the-reset-
button-on-nand-scaling)

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Symmetry
When I first heard about their techniques I was worried about their ability to
precisely guide nanotubes onto the chip pads, something that has deviled
people attempting to build nanotube transistor computers. Luckily their
diagrams make it look like they expect a number of nanotubes to cross each
connection making the whole thing far more robust to process variation.

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politician
With the endurance numbers they're publishing, I can't wait to hear about the
applications for reconfigurable computing.

Who wouldn't love a glob of 7nm _computronium_ that reconfigures itself on a
per-process basis?

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jffry
See also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684300)

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vardump
Even small amounts (megabytes) of NRAM could be pretty sweet as a non-volatile
write & read cache and book-keeping for SSDs and eMMCs.

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travjones
Everyone knows there's a direct relationship between stealth and FOMO.
Maximize FOMO by remaining stealth as long as possible.

