Samsung Electronics and Numonyx are to jointly develop market specifications for Phase Change Memory (PCM) devices aimed at high-end handsets.
“Creating common hardware and software compatibility for PCM products should help simplify designs and shorten development time,” said the companies.
The reason why firms are looking at phase change memory is that they claim it has potential for fast read and write speeds at lower power than conventional NOR and NAND flash memory. It also allows for bit alterability normally seen in RAM.
“We anticipate that PCM will eventually be a major addition to our family of memory products,” said SeiJin Kim, v-p at Samsung Electronics.
In February, Numonyx has taped out a 1Gbit phase change memory, according to the company's CTO, Ed Doller.
Samsung and Numonyx are developing common specifications – or “pin for pin” hardware and software compatibility – for mobile, embedded and other potential computing applications supporting the JEDEC LPDDR2 Low Power Memory Device Standard.
The LPDDR2 standard supports features such as power management and a shared interface for non-volatile memory (NVM) and volatile memory (SDRAM).
“Phase change memory will also be “executable”, allowing a separation of code and data for reliable code storage—particularly useful in handsets with higher data content,” said the companies.