Radical New Chip From Australia
The Sun Herald
Sunday February 10, 1991
RADICAL changes are ahead in the shape, size and scope of the personal computer, following major developments announced last week.
Computers are likely to become smaller, more mobile (see below), and much more powerful.
The Australian-controlled Ramtron group launched its long-awaited FRAM chip which, unlike current chips, retains its memory when power is turned off.
The promising development could deliver a fortune to its Australian backers as they seek to carve out a major slice of the $26billion semiconductor market.
Ramtron has forecast company revenues of more than $500m by 1995.
Virtually all personal computers use dynamic random access memory (DRAM)chips as a form of temporary storage.
When you boot up your PC, the DRAM chips load the computer's operating system into their memory, along with application software like word processing, graphics or spreadsheet programs, normally stored on hard or floppy discs or on permanent read-only memory (ROM) chips.
DRAM memory is lost once the power is switched off so users must save files on a hard drive or a floppy disc, or lose their work.
Ramtron's FRAM (ferroelectronic random access memory) chips use a different technology.
Electric current polarises the atoms in cells of a special ceramic material, lining them up rather like iron filings attracted by a magnet. They keep their new alignment when the power is switched off, retaining their data
With an FRAM system, your computer wouldn't need DRAM chips, ROM chips or even a hard disc drive: banks of ferroelectronic chips would do the job of all of them.
Ramtron's FRAMs are much smaller and flatter than DRAM chips, so they should take up less space.
And because all the processing would be taking place within memory, without the computer continuously seeking out data stored on disc, it all happens a lot faster.
FRAM technology should have special attraction for the makers of laptop and notebook computers. Disc drives are both weighty and a power drain-often limiting laptops to less than two hours' battery life.
If the hard drives were replaced by FRAM chips, the laptops could be smaller, lighter and offer many hours or even days between battery charges.
Batteries would still be needed to illuminate the screen and provide basic computer functions, but they would be more like penlight cells than the weighty lead-acid and nickel-cadmium cells used in most of today's laptops.
The first FRAM chip, called the FMx1208, has begun to roll from Ramtron's Colorado Springs, US, plant. Others are being made under licence by NMB Semiconductors of Japan, TRW of the US and ITT of Germany.
The chip is not cheap, at around $6,500, and it's said to be suitable only for small devices like video cameras and postage meters.
But Ramtron Australia's deputy chairman Ross Lyndon-James, believes the company can develop a low-price high-performance FRAM chip for the computer market within two years.
He claimed this chip could improve operating system performance by 100,000 times; this has yet to be demonstrated.
How does an Australian company come to be at the cutting edge of a technology until now dominated by some of the largest US and Japanese high-tech companies?
West Australian entrepreneurs Ross Lyndon-James and Brian Harcourt, with experience in mining, engineering and finance circles, in 1983 started Newtech, a company to explore innovative ideas.
They bought rights to undeveloped technological ideas, including metallurgical processes, prefab modular housing systems, and what became the FRAM chip.
The latter had been invented by a Michigan man, George Rohrer, but he lacked the funds to develop it on his own.
Rohrer retained 49pc of the project until Newtech bought him out for $4m. The company spent another $17m developing the idea at Colorado University.
In 1986, Ramtron, by then listed on Australian stock exchanges, dropped all other projects to concentrate on FRAM. It hired design staff from Inmos, a leading US semiconductor company, and began development work in earnest.
While most of the action is happening in the US and Japan, Ramtron Australia has been negotiating with Australian companies to produce its chips locally.
* In other personal computer developments, both Apple Computer of the US and NEC of Japan are moving towards the idea of wireless communications.
Apple asked the US Federal Communications Commission to allocate part of the radio spectrum for use by computer makers. This would let PCs-and bigger computers-transmit and receive information across radio waves instead of through a wired network.
But the Japanese may have already jumped the gun on Apple. In Tokyo, NEC announced development of a laptop computer equipped with a wireless radio transmitter/receiver device.
The wireless laptop, expected to go on sale in April, will communicate via a service called Teleterminal, already accessible throughout Tokyo.
© 1991 The Sun Herald
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