In almost every kind of electronic equipment we buy today, there is memory in the form of SRAM and/or flash memory. Following Moores law, memories have doubled in size every second year. When Intel introduced the 1103 1Kbit dynamic RAM in 1971, it cost $20. Today, we can buy a 4Gbit SDRAM for the same price.
via The Memory Revolution | Sven Andersson | EE Times
Read now, a look back from an Ericsson engineer surveying the use of solid state, chip-based memory in electronic devices. It is always interesting to know how these things start and evolved over time. Advances in RAM design and manufacture are the quintessential example of Moore’s Law even more so than the advances in processors during the same time period. Yes CPUs are cool and very much a foundation upon which everything else rests (especially dynamic ram storage). But remember this Intel didn’t start out making microprocessors, they started out as a dynamic RAM chip company at a time that DRAM was just entering the market. That’s the foundation upon which even Gordon Moore knew the rate at which change was possible with silicon based semiconductor manufacturing.
Now we’re looking at mobile smartphone processors and System on Chip (SoC) advancing the state of the art. Desktop and server CPUs are making incremental gains but the smartphone is really trailblazing in showing what’s possible. We went from combining the CPU with the memory (so-called 3D memory) and now graphics accelerators (GPU) are in the mix. Multiple cores and soon fully 64bit clean cpu designs are entering the market (in the form of the latest model iPhones). It’s not just a memory revolution, but it is definitely a driver in the market when we migrated from magnetic core memory (state of the art in 1951-52 while developed at MIT) to the Dynamic RAM chip (state of the art in 1968-69). That drive to develop the DRAM brought all other silicon based processes along with it and all the boats were raised. So here’s to the DRAM chip that helped spur the revolution. Without those shoulders, the giants of today wouldn’t be able to stand.
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