David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 5/1/12 wrote:
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>>hcl64 (mario.smarq@gmail.com) on 4/30/12 wrote:
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>>And the last and best about ZRAM.. it was not on SOI it was >on bulk and on some exotic FinFET form..
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>ZRAM was on SOI and it was a failure. It was bad technology.
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>ZRAM on bulk is also problematic, but it didn't come till much later.
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>If you look back in 2007, ZRAM was working on SOI. Go read those press releases.
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>>Perhaps too expensive to manufacture now.. but not without >future... that is why Micron bought it.
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>So when do you think the first ZRAM products will come out?
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>My guess: Not for at least 10 years, and more likely never.
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>David

ZRAM on SOI was not a failure it was natural, it won a lot of international awards to a very small company like Innovative Silicon. The problem is, with such low margins in the DRAM business, nobody would risk it in * more expensive low volume* (<-> one thing implies the other) SOI wafers.

That is why they changed all developments to get the same on bulk wafers... *and for the main DRAM market*... cause ZRAM proved to scale bad in speed for larger macros, proved to be unattractive for caches(in this T-RAM is much better) and unable to replace SRAM, and this either for SOI or for bulk forms.

I guess ZRAM might yet be attractive, but not on JEDEC interfaces( which are tuned for 1T+1C), perhaps on much performant ones tailor made for it.

Memory Cube on ZRAM !?... perhaps Micron can yet surprise... that is IF Memory Cube is going anywhere anytime soon also.

The other problem is RRAM memristor kind of breakthroughs, which can yet prove to be kind of a universal type of RAM, which by being fast and non-volatile, may yet relegate 1t+1C and ZRAM and Flash to the history bin.