I don't know how many people still read the forum, but I thought I'd share this little bit of personal info since I think it's pretty exciting.
My recent absence on the boards here was primarily because I'd been busy with moving concerns and getting adjusted to my new job at a startup company here in CO.
I'm a chemist by trade, but I'm actually working for a semiconductor company that is attempting to replace the metal and plastic capacitors in RAM chips with organic molecules. My job is to produce large amounts of the target molecules for which the Discovery chemist has vetted the methodology.
The presentation they gave me at my interview (the fine details of which went over my head, natch) was that given the fact that using Metal X in your capacitor, you need Surface Area Y to obtain Charge Z- which is the minimum required for the rest of the chip to recognize as a 1 or a 0. This is non-negotiable. Problem with today's RAM is the fact that the total amount of surface area for even the smaller amounts of RAM has exceeded the actual amount of surface area on the wafer, and they've been drilling holes into it to increase it, making a microscopic Swiss Cheese that obviously has an upper limit for structure durability.
Enter our company. We're taking a clue from Mother Nature- who's been doing this crap for billions of years- and using a class of large, charge-carrying molecules to replace the current capacitors. When I say large, that's an exaggeration, because the molecules are obviously orders of magnitude smaller than any construct they can build in the wafer plants right now.
If we're successful beyond the prototype they created, I think it'll herald an explosion in capacity and speed, because not only will the density of the chips get a massive boost, but these molecules can hold their charge for seconds at a time. That's important because your computer spends an awful lot of time refreshing the info stored in your RAM because the capacitors can't hold their charge for more than a few milliseconds at a time. Think of how much more time your CPU will have to do it's own thing if it's only refreshing RAM data once every two seconds, instead of maybe 1000 times per second.
An added bonus is that I don't think changing the capacitor design will require any changing of the chip format, so we won't be ditching the SD or DDR format anytime soon- at least, not because of us.
Obviously we're looking at changing all types of memory formats if we're successful with simple RAM.
