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News Researchers produce first room-temperature SOx ReRAM

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by brumgrunt, 21 May 2012.

  1. brumgrunt

    brumgrunt What's a Dremel?

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  2. [USRF]Obiwan

    [USRF]Obiwan What's a Dremel?

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    Amazing. Most of the great breakthroughs are found by accident. This is one of them.
     
  3. bowman

    bowman Minimodder

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    Awkward. I've been reading too little tech and too much engine material to think of SOx as silicon oxide any more.

    I found myself wondering what on earth sulfur oxides had to do with memory technology..
     
  4. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Hah! I wanted to write "silicon oxide" in full, but the headline was already pushing illegibility so settled for SOx. Trouble is, it's a major breakthrough but one which is hard to quantify in a small number of words: it's not the first ReRAM prototype, or the first silicon oxide ReRAM prototype, or the first room-temperature ReRAM prototype, but the first room-temperature silicon oxide ReRAM prototype. Bit of a mouthful, that one!
     
  5. Paradigm Shifter

    Paradigm Shifter de nihilo nihil fit

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    In that case, us Si rather than S. One extra character, and it's not using the wrong element.
     
  6. Phil Rhodes

    Phil Rhodes Hypernobber

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    SOx makes me think of sodium vapour lights.
     
  7. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag What's a Dremel?

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    I'm glad i haven't bought an SSD yet, assuming something like this is affordable. Even if it isn't, i'm sure it'll drop the prices of SSD once that is no longer the fastest form of permanent storage.

    What I'd personally like to see is a SATA3 RAM drive, or better yet, a way to bridge 2 computers via SATA, where the 2nd computer is a RAM drive itself. If something like this were possible, it'd be even better if you could do something like RAID 0 with 4 ports, offering unbeatable speeds.
     
  8. Alecto

    Alecto Minimodder

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    Indeed it will ! And going by other technologies (LCD, LED, OLED, graphene etc.) it's only going to take what, 10+ years before it sees the light of day as a practical consumer item ?
     
  9. SpAceman

    SpAceman What's a Dremel?

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    It would be more appropriate to change all instances of SOx to SiOx with the x subscripted if possible. This would more accurately describe the silicon-rich silica used in this application.
     
  10. mclean007

    mclean007 Officious Bystander

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    Why? Sodium is Na.
    Yup, or SiO2 or even just SiO would be less confusing than SOx.
     
  11. fluxtatic

    fluxtatic What's a Dremel?

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    To the first, I like that idea...I like it a lot. If I wasn't completely broke, I would have maxed out the RAM in my system and handed most of it off to a RAM disk that initializes on boot. As long as you remember to sync your RAM disk back to permanent storage before you shut down, life is good.

    To the second, though, huh? What are you on about with that?
     
  12. e1ixer

    e1ixer What's a Dremel?

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    I love how my favourite tech news site is covering my research group's work, makes it way cooler than the BBC covering it. Please can someone remove the erroneous "SOx" in the title. A Facebook quote from Adnan himself:

    " Adnan Mehonic What is SOx? Sulfur oxide :D lol "

    Many here have already commented correctly that it's wrong so let's sort this out.
     
  13. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Headline's already changed (to SiO,) but there's not much I can do about this 'ere forum thread.
     
  14. yougotkicked

    yougotkicked A.K.A. YGKtech

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    @ schmidtbag: not exactly what your thinking, but a lot faster. check out OCZ's RevoDrives, that's DDR3 modules connnecting over a PCI-E bus. expensive as hell though.

    glad to see this, flash memory needs a breakthrough pretty bad right now IMO. commercialization is hard to do when the previous generation is literally 100 times cheaper.
     
  15. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag What's a Dremel?

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    Well first of all, I was thinking that possibly a laptop system would be used as the RAM drive, so that way its more likely to be low-power and would have a battery to help protect it from losing data. Being a linux user, it would be easy for me to write a script to automatically sync the data to a permanent form of storage - I already wrote a script that generates RAM drives.

    SATA is currently the fastest and cheapest form of data transfer that nearly every computer supports. If it were somehow possible to make a computer treat its SATA ports as a drive, the ports could be re-routed to the RAM drive (again, this is something Linux would likely be able to do), which could either allow multiple computers to connect to it at a time, or do RAID so you get unparalleled performance. If I knew how to treat a SATA port as a drive, I could probably take care of the rest myself. Or, if there was some sort of bridge that lets you "network" 2 computers via SATA. Ethernet isn't an option because its far too slow in comparison, I have yet to see any way to connect 2 computers via USB 3 (besides, even though that has a higher bandwidth, that doesn't mean its faster than SATA), and Thunderbolt isn't popular enough.
     
  16. vodkas666

    vodkas666 What's a Dremel?

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    I wouldn't say it was discovered by accident as they where looking at Si LED's, something that is know to be too awkward to work and still wouldn't be as cheap as what is available. They should be glad that they found something.
    Commercialization of anything Si based us quite easy as it is normally quite cheap and easy to produce in a large quantity compared to most solid state materials. In theory they should be as cheap, if not cheaper, than current technology once developed if enough interested parties can be found.

    I hope that when my co-authored paper on the development of an optical receiver that could make fibre-optic networks more viable that I could get this level of coverage, although I highly doubt anyone would pick it up :miffed:
     
  17. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    If it holds the promise of revolutionising the way optical networking works (many times faster, many times cheaper, many times longer-range - whatever) then I wouldn't be surprised. Email me an abstract - it sounds interesting.
     
  18. vodkas666

    vodkas666 What's a Dremel?

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    At the minute there is a problem with some of the characterizing of the material (the electron tunneling isn't what we thought it was) and we're waiting on someone else outside the department to do some modelling for it. As I'm the lesser of the partners being a 4th Year undergrad and co-working on it with a PhD student and supervisor I'll get there permissions first but once everything is in place I'll get back to you.

    It will allow for signal splitting without a huge consequence on the strength and our devices are being grown on a cheaper substrate now due to new growing techniques. They should also quite easily be quicker than the currently used material.

    P.S. It could be a few months as the PhD guy is really slow and I'm about to graduate.
     
  19. Phil Rhodes

    Phil Rhodes Hypernobber

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    About sodium vapour lights:

    Yes, but they're still colloquially referred to as "SOX" and "SON" type lamps. God knows why.
     
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