AMD backs plastic memory

AMD has quietly bought a company called Coatue which has been developing non-volatile plastic memory that is said to be as fast as D-Ram with 15 times the storage density of Flash - and 15 times cheaper.

The news was overshadowed by excitement over AMD's new 64bit Athlon64 chip. But if the performance claims on the company's website are justified, the technology could be far more revolutionary than the Athlon64.

However, Coatue is only one of several companies working on what is called thin-film polymer memory, including a Swedish company called Thin Film Electronics in which Intel has an interest - and which is reported to have hit problems with the technology. Coatue was not answering queries from PCW, but it was quoted in MIT's Technology Review last year as saying it planned to have a 32Gbit chip by 2004.

AMD has not said how much it paid for Coatue, in which it already had an interest. Coatue is now part of FASC, a joint venture with Fujitsu, and will trade under the name Spansion.

The plastic memory consists of a thin film of polymer sandwiched at the nodes of an address matrix. The resistance at any node can be flipped from a few hundred ohms to several megohms by applying a positive or negative current. Potentially different resistance levels could store several bits per cell; data density could be boosted further by stacking layers.

Coatue was AMD's second major purchase within a few days. It also bought National Semiconductor's Geode system-on-a-chip operations. Geodes, which have peripheral logic round an x86 core, were used in several pioneering reference designs by Natsemi, including some of the earliest wireless Internet access tablets.

Natsemi announced late last year that it was selling off the Geode to concentrate on its core analogue business.

Billy Edwards, head of AMD's Personal Connectivity Solutions group, said the purchase would help 'extend x86 architecture into new low-power and high-performance applications.'