Japanese Scientists Create RAM Storage Based on Light
NTT Labs has succeeded in building a prototype of what the company calls optical random access memory, or short o-RAM.
The idea is to remove the bottleneck between fiber optics and electronic circuits and create a light-speed version of today's DRAM architecture for high-speed data center applications.
According to a research paper published in Nature Photonics, the prototype has a capacity of 4 bits and transfers data at 40 Gbps. It features extremely low power consumption at just 30 nW. While it is far from a commercial product, the researchers believe that it is a foundation for the development of far more capable o-RAM devices with a storage capacity in the range of Kb or Mb. The NTT researchers believe that a 100 Kb o-Ram for all optical network routers device could be built by 2020. A 1 Mb o-RAM chip could be available by 2025.
Each memory cell of the new technology is a nano-photonic crystal that ismade from indium phosphide that integrates a small strip of gallium arsenide phosphide. The flow of laser light is controlled via tiny holes on the outer portion of the cell, while a path in the middle of the crystal was created to allow light to enter and exit the device. Each cell can represent the values 1 or 0 by either transmitting light or blocking it by changing the refraction index of the material. Once a value is set, background light sourced from a laser maintains the refraction index.
The approach apparently enabled the scientists to store data for up to 10 seconds, which is up from 250 nanoseconds in previous similar devices.
Also Light based computers failed in the consumer market because they were not cheap enough and were not that practical for the consumer.
Look pal, there's a reason why DRAM is never used as a cache for processors, or why processors even have cache. DRAM's latency is way too high for such high CPU performance, especially if you have the DRAM located a few centimeters away from the CPU.
I don't care about your hexacore 6 GHz processor if it doesn't have enough cache or none at all, because it's going to spend almost all of its cycles on waiting for the DRAM to respond and end up being a really hot .1 GHz processor.
Who knows, maybe they'll adapt it for HAL
are you sure about the 10 seconds?? thought I read a post somewhere last week theat said 10 ms.
additional 3 year wait for this to be in the consumer market ,$100;
a chance to own your own son in a ultra realistic video game because you have better frame rates than him with light based ram, Priceless.
Or if a patent troll sat on a patent that vaguely mentions o-RAM, and proceeds to file lawsuit against every tech company that dare to use it...
He apologised before you posted this. Just fyi.
Actually, several processors use DRAM as a cache. It is MUCH faster than the DRAM used in system memory, but it is still DRAM. It's called eDRAM, embedded DRAM. I think that the Xenon and Cell processors use it, among others. It is used for higher capacity caches (it is about five times denser than usual SRAM, or something like that) than SRAM, but somewhat slower. It makes a great L3 cache with SRAM L1 and L2 caches.
eDRAM isn't as dense as system DRAM, but it is still the same tech, but using a different process. System DRAM uses a different, higher performance process than CPUs and CPU cache usually do.