Ramtron International Corp, the Australian creator of ferroelectric non-volatile memory chips that is in process of turning itself into a US company, has caught the eye of Hitachi Ltd, which is sufficiently impressed with the technology that it has agreed to joint design of new test versions of the part using its own dynamic memory chip fabrication process, which will developed to production if the test is a success. Hitachi will fabricate base wafers for the test devices, and Ramtron, Colorado Springs, Colorado, will complete them with its ferroelectric process, initially doing 64K-bit parts before moving on to 256Ks. The attraction of the Ramtron design is that the parts approach or match the speed of dynamics, but retain their state when the power is cut off. The other attraction is that Flash memory is good for only about 100,000 write-erase cycles, whereas ferroelectric parts can stand up to over 100m write-erase cycles.
