NT&T; Announces Chip With 16 Times Memory of IBM’s
Japan’s Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Co. on Wednesday stole the limelight from industry giant IBM by announcing details of a computer memory chip 16 times more powerful than anything now commercially available.
International Business Machines Corp. announced earlier in the day at a semiconductor conference that it had designed and produced a computer memory chip able to store 4 million bits of data, or one-quarter the capability of the NTT device.
NTT has only developed a prototype of its 16-million-bit chip, and the device will probably not be commercially available for several years, but news of its development still attracted the most attention at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, often a forum for new chip advances.
The Japanese phone company’s chip is able to store 16 million bits of information, equal to 64 pages of newspaper text, on a slice of silicon the size of a dime. Once available, it will enable desktop-size computers to store as much information as today’s mainframes.
As a point of comparison, most personal computers today have a memory size of 256,000 bits.
NTT’s 16-million-bit chip was seen by industry experts as yet another example of Japan’s increasing dominance of the memory chip market, both in terms of market share and technological advances.
A U.S. Defense Dept. task force has called for funding of a consortium of American chip makers to develop a 64-million-bit chip. Even though an industry group has proposed a similar consortium, called Sematech, it has not yet determined that a giant memory chip would be its target product.
The IBM 4-million-bit chip, which the company said it has fabricated at its Vermont semiconductor plant, is also far from commercial availability. It was only last month that IBM announced it would become the first company to use an advanced 1-million-bit chip in its largest mainframe computers.
Tsuneo Mano, head of the team that developed the 16-million-bit chip for NTT’s Atsugi Electrical Communication Laboratories (the Japanese equivalent of ATT’s highly regarded Bell Labs), said the chip design “represented several breakthroughs in chip architecture, including a very sophisticated fabrication process.”
The chip, like the IBM 4-million-bit, is a type known as a D-RAM (dynamic random access memory), the most common type of semiconductor. Mano said NTT developed three specific technologies for the 16-million-bit chip, all of which dramatically increase speed and reduce power consumption.
The Japanese company has already fabricated a test device for the 16-million-bit chip, and Mano said it successfully tested the chip’s architecture, demonstrating its validity.
He said the chip is composed of about 40 million circuits on an 8.9 millimeter-by-16.6 millimeter-chip and can access data at a at a speed of 80 nanoseconds (a billionth of a second), the same speed as IBM’s most advanced 1-million-bit chip.
IBM scientists told the conference that its 4-million-bit chip can access data at a speed of 65 nanoseconds.
Several other companies, including Texas Instruments and Japanese concerns, have already announced development of 4-million-bit chips. None of the new chips have been commercially produced.
IBM, by far the world’s largest computer company, gave no timetable for mass production of its 4-million-bit chip, but an analyst said it would be at least two to three years before the new IBM device will find its way to the marketplace. The chip is likely to be used first in IBM’s big mainframe computers and desktop models aimed at engineers and designers.
