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Chinese start-up Numemory claims memory chip breakthrough amid US tech sanctions

Daniel Nenni

Admin
Staff member

The Wuhan-based firm recently introduced to the domestic market its 64-gigabyte NM101, a type of storage-class memory chip​



Numemory’s new product shows how Chinese memory chip companies continue to push advances in technology, despite US sanctions. Photo: Shutterstock


Chinese semiconductor start-up Numemory has launched what it touts as the largest-capacity memory chip in its category designed and produced on the mainland, claiming that it is a breakthrough that bolsters the country’s technology self-sufficiency efforts amid stifling US government sanctions.

Numemory, formally known as Xincun Technology (Wuhan) Co, recently introduced to the domestic market its 64-gigabyte NM101, a type of storage-class memory (SCM) chip that is “expected to break the long-term monopoly of international giants in this field”, according to a report on Wednesday by the government-run Hubei Daily newspaper, without providing details.

Similar products in the market only offer megabyte-range capacity, according to the report, which pointed out the chip’s potential to “significantly reduce the country’s reliance on foreign memory technologies”.

 
This is phase change memory. And unlike what the article claims the capacity per chip is only 64 Gbit.

See the company's product announcement:

I doubt it will be successful outside of certain niche applications.

This article is more informative than that in the SCMP.
 
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Very similar, maybe a resurrection? I do not remember why Optane failed. The Product? The Micron partnership? Or Intel itself?
Adding layers to Optane, called "decks", was much more costly in R&D than adding layers in NAND flash chips, so Optane density fell far behind NAND. Since the real value proposition for Optane was as a DRAM extender, not SCM, and the production performance specs did not make Optane DIMMs competitive in latency or endurance with DRAM DIMMS, Optane's market was constricted. When used for memory extension, the lack of near-infinite endurance like DRAM also required a DRAM cache to reduce writes.


Intel and Micron could make very low latency and relatively high endurance SSDs from Optane, and due to cost they were best used as a competitor for NVDIMMs in file systems and database management, but in the grand context of SSDs that's a very small market. Vast Data is good example, they used Optane SSDs to buffer file system writes for their QLC SSD persistent storage, and Oracle was known to have been modifying their database systems to accommodate Optane DIMM technology.



Optane needed big markets to fund its high R&D and production costs, and only memory extension could provide that. Without DRAM-like endurance, Optane needed more implementation cost in client and servers, and system software, which was likely weighing down design wins.
 
This is phase change memory. And unlike what the article claims the capacity per chip is only 64 Gbit.

See the company's product announcement:

I doubt it will be successful outside of certain niche applications.

This article is more informative than that in the SCMP.
If they are working on selector-only memory, that is a step beyond 3D XPoint, which would have the advantage of not having to deal with the phase change. SK Hynix recently worked on that too, showed it at VLSI 2024 https://research.skhynix.com/blog/detail?seq=206. It's still chalcogenide-based, though. That has material complications.
 
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