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U.S. inventor of DRAM tech honored with Japan award |
June 21, 2013
A U.S. researcher at IBM who invented the basic building block of the modern DRAM has been honored with a prestigious Japanese award and a US$500,000 prize.Robert Dennard was given the Kyoto Prize in the electronics category on Friday, awarded by the Inamori Foundation. The first DRAM chip that used his technology went on sale in 1973. DRAM at that time had less storage than current versions -- it was sold in 1k and 4k varieties.Dennard's invention involved combining a field-effect transistor and capacitor in a single cell to store a charge that represented a single bit of data. Cells were then arranged on a grid structure, allowing them to be accessed in random order, as opposed to sequential storage like tape.This random access memory was called "dynamic" because the charge on each cell gradually fades over time and must be periodically recharged. The recharge cycle is short enough to allow for quick reads and writes, on the scale of nanoseconds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2042643/us-inventor-of-dram-tech-honored-with-japan-award.html#tk.rss_all
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