BCC Research has recently unveiled a new research report format: the FLASH report. Shorter, and focused on recent news or industry developments that are under the radar, the inaugural report
Is NRAM Creating Market Volatility? was released this week.
We spoke with Chris Spivey, one of BCC Research’s senior editors and co-author on the report. Below are excerpts from the conversation
NRAM has been kicking around forever. Why dedicate the report to it now?
The trigger was
Fujitsu’s announcement it had licensed the technology to develop ‘breakthrough memory products for multiple markets’. Rather than fight alone,
Nantero has enabled a host of competitors to attack entrenched positions.
Can you give us a small peek at why NRAM will hold the advantage vs. Flash, SRAM and DRAM in the coming years? The key word is
breakthrough. With NRAM we depart the word of silicon and embrace cell phones, laptops and even an internet, that is increasingly going to become carbon based organisms. Smaller components that work faster but require less energy are absolute winners.
Is there industry acceptance or skepticism about these predictions?
Great skepticism. It has had a long history of high hopes that went undelivered till now. However,
this report reveals to the public for the first time actual chip architecture. Coupled to licensing announcements anticipated (early) in the first quarter of 2017, the tide will turn precipitously.
What is the most exciting aspect (scientifically speaking) of what is happening with NRAM? Movement to carbon from silicon, which can evidently be carried out seamlessly on traditional CMOS foundries and also, it seems, even in logic foundries. This ushers in an era of potential mass customization.
Who are the big winners if NRAM is a success? Mass customization, means a chip can be optimized for a specific task. Not only will this allow things like cheap abundant autonomous sensors for the internet of things, but the intellectual property of the manufacturing
behind those sensors, will be owned by the people that imagined them. This is a paradigm shift of enormous importance in the semiconductor industry, but also in the phone industry, embedded ASICS for automobiles, headphones that store music intrinsically, and so on and so forth.
This is a different kind of report for BCC Research- how did these changes affect your approach to the research? Topics covered in our traditional reports have a shelf life of two years or longer. While urgency is always an aspect, utility is based more on depth of coverage and rigorous methodology - always keeping in mind special conditions that apply to that market. FLASH reports are designed to respond quickly to an important moment in a technology evolution or market perturbation. It can be triggered by legislation, scientific discovery, product recall, or as in this case, a major licensing agreement announcement. FLASH reports aim to quickly provide the inside story, based on firsthand knowledge and analysis, to alert our readers to something important and actionable, but largely unreported.