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Date Posted: 21:55:19 03/05/00 Sun
Author: warren
Subject: RMTR and smart cards...

A repost from the Gorilla and King Portfolio candidates
thread on SI.


To: michel petit who wrote (19435)
From: claptonsguitar
Sunday, Mar 5, 2000 5:12 PM ET
Reply # of 19448


Re: Smart Cards Technology Gorillas

RMTR might be one you want to investigate. It's their patented memory chip that will be inside almost all of these
cards. (Actually, others who make it will be paying them some form of royalties.)

They do have some competition. However, RMTR is the only one publicly traded in the U.S.
Current price ~$20.

Here's a Link and the article that talks about this type of memory that requires no power and has super fast
read/write/rewrite characteristics and is nonvolitile.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0308/6305132a.htm

Portable gadgets always had to compromise
between speed and stamina?until ferroelectric
science came to the rescue. It just might rewrite
the chip industry.

A computer in every shirt
collar?

By Neil Weinberg

WALK THE HALLWAY at Celis Semiconductor
Corp., a ten-person chip designer in Colorado
Springs, Colo., and you get a tour of the
computer memory business. On one side chip
engineers from Matsushita and Mitsubishi crouch
over workstations in dimly lit offices. Across the
hall: rivals from Korea's Hyundai and France's
STMicroelectronics. A padlocked rack of
routers and electronic firewalls keep everyone
honest.

Samsung, the world's largest memory maker,
Siemens, NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi have
descended upon Colorado Springs lately. What's
the draw? Tiny Celis, along with nearby parent
Symetrix and crosstown rival Ramtron, have
turned the town into the fountainhead for a
technology that could be, for the next generation
of portable computers and telephones, what
DRAMs are for today's PCs.

The new technology is known as ferroelectric
random access memory, or FRAM?as
distinguished from DRAM (for dynamic random
access memory). The technology is already doing
duty inside millions of cell phones. The allure: the
potential to combine the best features of other
memory chips without the drawbacks?to work
at blazing speeds yet consume far less energy and
last far longer.

FRAMs could let digital cameras shoot one photo
after another continuously, instead of having to
wait several seconds to save each image. In
electronic organizers, FRAMs could replace
today's memory chips, make do with much
smaller batteries and eliminate hard-disk backup.

FRAMs will catch on in a big way in the next few
years, particularly in low-end stuff?inside
videogames, air bags and VCRs. But some
sophisticated new devices are coming, too.
Millions of FRAM-powered smart cards are
bound for automatic fare collection on subways
and buses in Washington, D.C., Shanghai and
elsewhere. The chips for the credit-card-size
devices, supplied by Nasdaq-listed Ramtron, sip
so little power that they run entirely on a radio
signal from a turnstile-mounted reader. The
FRAMs wake up, deduct the fare and send it
back to the reader in a tenth of a second.

The new chips are so cheap and durable that they
may soon win work in no-stop toll booths and
package-tracking tags?even as button-sized
chips identifying a shirt's owner and telling the dry
cleaner how much starch to use.

FRAMs cost as little as 20 cents apiece, yet
Fujitsu expects the FRAM market to grow from
near zero last year to $10 billion in 2002. The
technology one day may even challenge DRAM
chips in computers, a $16-billion-a-year
business?although not anytime soon.

The crystals inside FRAMs have 100 times the
capacity to hold an electric charge as the silicon
dioxide in a DRAM, so in some theoretical sense
FRAMs ought to be able to store information 100
times as densely. But production techniques have
a long way to go. The densest FRAM chips, due
this summer, will hold only 4 million bits of data
(4 megabits), laughably primitive compared with
the 64-megabit DRAMs now in use.

This misses the point. FRAM's real promise isn't
as an understudy for DRAMs but as the
centerpiece of new wireless gadgets. "Our goal
isn't to replace DRAMs but to use FRAMs to
create new portable markets," says Carlos
Mazure, who runs ferroelectric development at
Siemens.

To be sure, high-tech is littered with memory
might-have-beens that fell victim to their own
glitches and to blinding improvements in DRAMs
and disk storage (see sidebar). But FRAM's
inherent advantages are clear.

DRAMs run at blazing speeds, yet, as countless
cursing PC users know, a power shutdown results
in amnesia. Memory loss doesn't happen for two
other kinds of chips?flash memory and
Eeproms; they run everything from microwave
ovens to wristwatches. But that feature means
they are especially poky at storing new data.

FRAMs, by contrast, are as speedy as DRAMs,
yet, like flash memory, retain their data when the
power is off. And FRAMs do it better. They can
store data for years without consuming any
electricity. Compared with flash and Eeproms,
they can download data thousands of times
faster, yet use one-tenth the power and run
100,000 times longer before wearing out. A
FRAM could handle word-processing functions
for years; flash memory would wear out almost
immediately.

Ferroelectrics have been around for a century.
The name aside, they contain no iron; they are
ceramic crystals that, when zapped with an
electrical charge, take on a positive or negative
electric polarity. Work on computer uses began
in earnest in the 1950s, but foiled research
powerhouses IBM, Bell Labs and Westinghouse.
In 1973 IBM scientists declared FRAMs a
dead-end.

Early prototypes quickly "fatigued"?they
stopped holding a charge or data. They also
interacted badly with the foundation of all other
memory chips: silicon.

The resurrection came in the early 1980s when
Carlos Araujo, a professor at the University of
Colorado, began working with industry veterans
Larry McMillan and George Rohrer. They
formed Ramtron in 1982 to develop a new
design. It eliminated the bad silicon interaction by
making a FRAM sandwich?putting the FRAM
between two microscopic electrodes to separate
it from the silicon base.

Araujo and McMillan left Ramtron and set up
Symetrix in 1988 to work on the fatigue problem.
They set a deadline: Find a solution by year-end
1991 or shut down. (Rohrer left in 1987; he died
last year at 62.)

Four months before their self-destruct date, they
found a solution: a silicon substitute that could
crunch data for ten years without fatiguing?SBT,
or strontium bismuth tantalate. Araujo showed
the material to Matsushita engineers, who were
so struck by its rock-solid structure that they sent
a second crew to double-check the results. In
1995 Matsushita paid $5 million for 10% of
Symetrix.

Matsushita's early FRAM success came not in
memories but in high-density filters in cell phones
to block unwanted microwave signals. FRAMs
shrank the six-chip modules that unscramble
phone signals to one-fiftieth their previous size.
Matsushita now controls more than half the world
market for the modules and will make 100 million
this year.

While Symetrix and its offspring, Celis, work with
SBT, Ramtron has invested $150 million over the
years in an older ferroelectric memory technology
known as lead zirconium titanate, or PZT.
Ramtron already has sold several million PZT
chips for devices such as wireless meter readers.

Now Ramtron and Symetrix both hope to push
into bigger markets. "If we can overcome the
barriers of time and money," says Symetrix's
Araujo, "you'll soon see products like PDAs
(personal digital assistants) with long battery lives
that can always be hooked to the Net. You'll be
able to download a 35-page report at your
dinner table in seconds."

Your Palm Pilot may soon look like an antique
pocket watch.

--

Do your DD.

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