After more than 25 years in those trenches, and in the memory business in particular, California’s Rambus, Inc. today finds itself in a better position than ever to demonstrate to the public sphere its longtime role as a memory innovator with a lot of experience in the industry. Though its existence, Rambus has played an undeniably central, and certainly very tumultuous, role in shaping the modern memory industry as it stands both in technical and business terms.
Connected vehicles are still vulnerable to hacks
Junko Yoshida, Chief International Correspondent at UBM Electronics, recently reported that the automotive industry is still “ill equipped” to protect connected from hackers. Indeed, according to a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute, only 41 percent of developers agreed secure software was a priority for their companies, while 28 percent disagreed.
Perovskite memristor is just 5 nanometers thick
Professors Jennifer Rupp and Markus Kubicek of ETH Zurich have built a memristor based on a slice of perovskite measuring just 5 nanometers thick.
According to Science Daily, the component features three stable resistive states. Essentially, this means the device is capable of storing the 0 or 1 of a standard bit, and can also be used for information encoded by three states: the 0, 1 and 2 of a “trit.”
Searching for life on Mars with spider silk sensors
Did you know that optical sensors made with spider silk could one day help scientists search for trace gases such as ammonia produced by biological processes on Mars?
“The scientists hunting for life on Mars would like to be able to test for small amounts of ammonia,” reports Neil Savage of IEE Spectrum. “[These] might be emitted by the metabolism of microbes, so they need a sensor that can detect that while remaining insensitive to the large amounts of carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.”
Researchers eye graphene for next-gen memory chips
Stanford engineers have demonstrated a number of post-silicon memory materials and technologies based on graphene. According to Ramin Skibba of Stanford News, the materials are capable of storing significantly more data per square inch – all while sipping a fraction of the energy consumed by current memory chips.
This memory chip orbited the earth on March 23, 1965
Engadget’s Nathan Ingraham recently reported that a piece of RANAM (Random Access Non-Destructive Readout) from NASA’s Gemini 3 spacecraft is up for auction. The RANAM – containing 4096 bits of information – was a part of the first Gemini spacecraft on-board computer ever to fly on a manned mission.
