NEC, the Japanese electronics company, has reached another milestone in technology鈥檚 steady march towards smaller, faster and more powerful computers. It announced last week that it has created a memory chip capable of holding 1 billion bits of information. The new chip can hold text equivalent to 10 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare or 15 minutes of video footage.
NEC鈥檚 gigabit dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip has 16 times the capacity of the largest chip used in today鈥檚 computers, and 4 times the capacity of the sophisticated DRAM chip being developed by a consortium of IBM, Toshiba and Siemens. NEC announced its new chip at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
鈥淚n the multimedia era, we need a big memory capacity to handle the high volume of data needed for not only text but audio and video,鈥� says Kazuko Andersen of NEC. Andersen says that the chip is also faster than its smaller competitors and uses less power.
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So far, NEC has produced only a single prototype of the gigabit chip. The company used existing technology to etch the circuits with lines 0.25 micrometres wide 鈥� roughly the width of a single bacterial cell. It hopes to reduce the line width still further, to 0.15 or 0.18 micrometres, in order to bring the chip鈥檚 size down from the prototype鈥檚 26 by 36 millimetres to a production model about the size of a thumbnail, says Andersen.
NEC expects it will take more than three years and a further $1.5 billion to produce samples of the chip for computer manufacturers. Commercial production is not expected before the turn of the century.
