'Numonyx does not offer any PRAM chip commercially, despite their claims', writes one, 'Numonyx is refusing to provide a datasheet for its current 128Mbit 90nm "product" and the chip is not available for purchase.'
So last week I asked Numonyx's PR people to get me a datasheet for the 90nm 128Mbit 'product'.
On Wednesday I received the following message: "
"Numonyx isn't broadly distributing the Alverstone (128Mbit 90nm PRAM) data sheets for obvious competitive reasons. They have received a lot of suspicious requests from less than credible sources - but it has sent to a small number of press who have written on the technology with a strict agreement that it's not forwarded or reprinted in its entirety."
How weird is that|? It's not unprecedented but it's pretty rare. So far, it would seem, the claims of the sceptics look kosher.
Another comment is: 'Samsung has had 512Mbit PRAM device in sampling for more than a year, but again, has not commercialized it, despite promises to do so by the end of the third quarter last year. Apparently the issue is lack of demand for such an inferior product - slow write, low density, and high cost, combined with likely power consumption issues.'
Another comment is: 'There is no PRAM on the market, unless you count the 4Mbit radiation hardened product by BAE, which apparently nobody wants to buy'.
Last week I ran into Ron Neale who, in the September 28th 1970 edition of Electronics magazine had a paper published, co-authored by Gordon Moore, about phase change memory.
Last week Neale reckoned that the underlying problems of phase change which have not been solved for 40 years, would, very likely, never be solved.
A technology which has been in gestation for 40 years without ever being productised doesn't inspire confidence about its future.
So is phase change a kind of 'techno-Ponzi' scheme whereby techies keep getting money out of investors for promising to deliver a technology tomorrow which, of course, never comes?
