IBM has developed a prototype of what could become the industry’s smallest, densest, and fastest on-chip dynamic memory device, in the form of 32 nanometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, promising improvements in speed, power savings, and reliability for a wide range of products.
By insulating transistors against electrical leakage, IBM’s SOI technology is able to boast performance increases of up to 30 percent while reducing power consumption by 40 percent over conventional silicon technologies. This has allowed them to produce sample embedded dynamic random access memory (eDRAM) chips that have the smallest memory cell in the industry, while offering density, speed, and capacity surpassing that of conventional on-chip static random access memory (SRAM) in either 32 nanometer or 22 nanometer technologies, and closer to that of 15 nanometer SRAM technology. With latency and cycle times of less than 2 nanoseconds, IBM’s 32 nanometer SOI eDRAM is the fastest embedded memory announced to date.