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November 2022
TAP TIMES
Scary times ahead for semiconductor memory?
‘t hese are the
times that try
men’s (and wom-
en’s) souls.”
When political ac-
tivist Thomas Paine
wrote those im-
mortal words in
1776, he might easily have been
referring to the pain felt by the ha-
bitués of the semiconductor industry
after two years of struggle in a roil-
ing global pandemic and the result-
ing shortage of chips from automo-
biles to cameras to smartphones.
Memories are made of this
Just when it appeared the worst was
over, we learned that the usually vibrant
semiconductor memory market, specifi -
cally DRAM and NAND fl ash, is tumbling in
freefall.
Ron Iscoff , Editor
roniscoff @gmail.com
Ubiquitous worldwide
Since the use of memory chips is ubiqui-
tous worldwide, these scary media reports
are concerning. Memory, after all — CPUs
aside — are at the heart of smart phones,
computers and a host of our other beloved
devices, such as tablets.
Before we look at the current memory sec-
tor, it might be instructive to go back in
time and look at how the memory industry
evolved.
Decades ago, before the birth of the semi-
TM Volume 13, Number 10
conductor, in fact, there was magnetic core
memory which represented a substantial
part of the large, cumbersome workings of
mainframe computers, such as the classic
IBM System 360.
Core memory was the predominant form
Random access
of random-access computer memory for
20 years, between about 1955 and 1975,
according to Wikipedia.
Core uses toroids (rings) of a hard mag-
netic material (usually a semi-hard fer-
rite as transformer cores). Each wire was
threaded through the core serving as a
transformer winding.
In the spring
of 1948, Dr. An
Wang was hired to
work at the Har-
vard Computa-
tion Laboratory in
Cambridge, Mass.,
according to a bi-
ography. Core memory
Wang was born in Shanghai, China in 1920
and left his homeland in 1945 to continue
his education at Harvard, where he earned
his doctorate.
At the time Wang joined
the Harvard Lab, it was the
home of the ASSC Mark 1,
one of the world’s fi rst digi-
tal computers. Dr. Wang’s
charter was to develop a
method to store and re-
next page An Wang