8-48 Billion Transistor per Gig of Memory, wow.

[Rusty Heap]

I was recently reminiscing about my youth in the 60's and 70's with the First Portable Radios bragged the more transistors the better the radio. this one has 3 or Five, no Seven!

I was maybe 7-8, Laying in bed late at night staying up till the wee hours listening to Dr Demento on my Crystal Radio set with the single ear plug. Hi Tech I say. To call your Neighbor you just had to pull the string tighter between the tin cans.





A question to myself recently popped into my feeble brain, thank god for google to the rescue


How many transistors are in a 1GB memory?

If it’s a Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) then there are 6 transistors per unit cell “bit” but there are 8 bits in a Byte so a 1 GigaByte (GB) memory has 6*8 billion transistors or 48 billion transistors.
If it’s a Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) then there is only one transistor (and one capacitor) in each bit. Using the same calculation as above that would make 8 billion transistors. Early planar DRAMS used more area for the capacitor than for the transistor so for the purposes of an area or Moore’s law calculation the number of “transistors” would have been double. More recently, the capacitor is stacked on top so 8 billion transistors is the proper count.
The same is true for flash memory which uses one transistor with a second “floating” gate directly above the first.

[GH85Carrera]

I remember my very first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 with just 16K of RAM. I knew that was not enough, so I bought the add on cartridge memory module to bring it up to 20K. It would get so hot it was like a hand warmer. It had a cassette drive file storage device that would take 10 minutes to save a program of a few Kilobytes.

Now I have a computer with 256Gig of Ram, and 18 TB of storage. Today I easily downloaded a 14 GB file of one my company shot of most of downtown OKC, that is 2 inch resolution. It just blows my mind.

[3rd_gear_Ted]

3.4 defects per Million opportunities is Six Sigma. 99.99966%
Motorola & Intel are the early pioneers of this manufacturing methodology that is used throughout the manufacturing process and for reliability engineering.

[zakthor]

Made me think - technology has come so far in the past 20 years. The past 100, the past 10000. But people don’t change. Same stupid species just different toys.

Hopefully technology will eventually help us evolve but if not I guess it will eventually destroy us.

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by 3rd_gear_Ted

3.4 defects per Million opportunities is Six Sigma. 99.99966%...

Well, I wouldn't call the individual elements independent - but 6-S is a mindset/religion and it certainly applies. As to the chip, I'm guessing there is a bunch of error correction and auto-optimization that pushes things even more away from the "kagillion-at-once" lith processing.

How far back to the beginning do we have to go to have one person understand and plan the layout of a processor or memory chip? Now it's software to interpret the results of software-designed blocs based on software-optimized layouts based on near "voodoo-science" concepts around the mechanisms that circuits have at such minuscule (nm) dimensions. Material things so small that they are more "surface" than they are "bulk" and therefore they frequently (usually?) break all of the rules that smart people thought that they understood.

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by mjohnson

...Material things so small that they are more "surface" than they are "bulk" and therefore they frequently (usually?) break all of the rules...

This simultaneously arouses the metallurgist/mat'l scientist in me - interfaces are where all of the good (and bad) stuff happens - and terrifies me from a supply-chain assurance point of view. More than a few times in the last ten years or so ago we were told to expect some back-sliding on tech in the really, really important bits of the nucular-weapons-industrial-complex. Perhaps relying on what you can understand and verify is important is important?

Bunged up material certs and records of assembly for airplane things is far from the worst case scenario...

[LWJ]

Big numbers to be sure.

Consider this. Commercial kombucha has 100 to 500 million organisms in a bottle.

And each organism has large data DNA.

That gallon or so bubbling in my kitchen has a lot going on.