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Samsung Electronics announced today that it has begun mass producing the industry's first 10-nanometer (nm) class, 8-gigabit (Gb) DDR4 (double-data-rate-4) DRAM chips and the modules derived from them. DDR4 is quickly becoming the most widely produced memory for personal computers and IT networks in the world, and Samsung's latest advancement will help to accelerate the industry-wide shift to advanced DDR4 products.Samsung opened the door to 10nm-class DRAM for the first time in the industry after overcoming technical challenges in DRAM scaling. These challenges were mastered using currently available ArF (argon fluoride) immersion lithography, free from the use of EUV (extreme ultra violet) equipment.Samsung's roll-out of the 10nm-class (1x) DRAM marks yet another milestone for the company after it first mass produced 20-nanometer (nm) 4Gb DDR3 DRAM in 2014."Samsung's 10nm-class DRAM will enable the highest level of investment efficiency in IT systems, thereby becoming a new growth engine for the global memory industry," said Young-Hyun Jun, President of Memory Business, Samsung Electronics. "In the near future, we will also launch next-generation, 10nm-class mobile DRAM products with high densities to help mobile manufacturers develop even more innovative products that add to the convenience of mobile device users."Samsung's leading-edge 10nm-class 8Gb DDR4 DRAM significantly improves the wafer productivity of 20nm 8Gb DDR4 DRAM by more than 30 percent.The new DRAM supports a data transfer rate of 3,200 megabits per second (Mbps), which is more than 30 percent faster than the 2,400Mbps rate of 20nm DDR4 DRAM. Also, new modules produced from the 10nm-class DRAM chips consume 10 to 20 percent less power, compared to their 20nm-process-based equivalents, which will improve the design efficiency of next-generation, high-performance computing (HPC) systems and other large enterprise networks, as well as being used for the PC and mainstream server markets.The industry-first 10nm-class DRAM is the result of Samsung's advanced memory design and manufacturing technology integration. To achieve an extremely high level of DRAM scalability, Samsung has taken its technological innovation one step further than what was used for 20nm DRAM. Key technology developments include improvements in proprietary cell design technology, QPT (quadruple patterning technology) lithography, and ultra-thin dielectric layer deposition.Unlike NAND flash memory, in which a single cell consists of only a transistor, each DRAM cell requires a capacitor and a transistor that are linked together, usually with the capacitor being placed on top of the area where the transistor rests. In the case of the new 10nm-class DRAM, another level of difficulty is added because they have to stack very narrow cylinder-shaped capacitors that store large electric charges, on top of a few dozen nanometer-wide transistors, creating more than eight billion cells.Samsung successfully created the new 10nm-class cell structure by utilizing a proprietary circuit design technology and quadruple patterning lithography. Through quadruple patterning, which enables use of existing photolithography equipment, Samsung also built the core technological foundation for the development of the next-generation 10nm-class DRAM (1y).In addition, the use of a refined dielectric layer deposition technology enabled further performance improvements in the new 10nm-class DRAM. Samsung engineers applied ultra-thin dielectric layers with unprecedented uniformity to a thickness of a mere single-digit angstrom (one 10 billionth of a meter) on cell capacitors, resulting in sufficient capacitance for higher cell performance.Based on its advancements with the new 10nm-class DDR4 DRAM, Samsung expects to also introduce a 10nm-class mobile DRAM solution with high density and speed later this year, which will further solidify its leadership in the ultra-HD smartphone market.While introducing a wide array of 10nm-class DDR4 modules with capacities ranging from 4GB for notebook PCs to 128GB for enterprise servers, Samsung will be extending its 20nm DRAM line-up with its new 10nm-class DRAM portfolio throughout the year. Explore futher: Samsung’s Galaxy S7 -- A Tale of Two Image Sensors  

LM4910LQ belonging to the Boomer series of National Semiconductors is an integrated stereo amplifier primarily intended for stereo headphone applications. The IC can be operated from 3.3V ans its can deliver 0.35mW output power into a 32 ohm load. The LM4910LQ has very low distortion ( less than 1%)   and the shutdown current is less than 1uA. This low shut down current makes it suitable for battery operated applications. The IC is so designed that there is no need of the output coupling capacitors, half supply by-pass capacitors and bootstrap capacitors. Other features of the IC are   turn ON/OFF click elimination, externally programmable gain etc. Stereo headphone amplifier LM4910LQCircuit diagram of the LM4910LQ stereo headphone amplifier is shown above.C1 and C2 are the input DC decoupling capacitors for the left and right input channels. R1 and R2 are the respective input resistors. R3 is the feed back resistor for left channel while R4 is the feed back resistor for the right channel. C3 is the power supply filter capacitor. The feedback resistors also sets the closed loop gain in conjunction with the corresponding input resistors. Notes:The IC is available only  in SMD packages and care must be taken while soldering.The circuit can be powered from anything between 2.2V to 5V DC.The load can be a 32 ohm headphone.Absolute maximum supply voltage is 6V  and anything above it will destroy the IC.A logic low voltage at the shutdown pins shut downs the IC and a logic high voltage at the same pin activates the IC. 

Silicon memory chips come in two broad types: volatile memory, such as computer RAM that loses data when the power is turned off, and nonvolatile flash technologies that store information even after we shut off our smartphones.In general, volatile memory is much faster than nonvolatile storage, so engineers often balance speed and retention when picking the best memory for the task. That's why slower flash is used for permanent storage. Speedy RAM, on the other hand, works with processors to store data during computations because it operates at speeds measured in nanoseconds, or billionths of a second.Now Stanford-led research shows that an emerging memory technology, based on a new class of semiconductor materials, could deliver the best of both worlds, storing data permanently while allowing certain operations to occur up to a thousand times faster than today's memory devices. The new approach may also be more energy efficient."This work is fundamental but promising," said Aaron Lindenberg, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. "A thousandfold increase in speed coupled with lower energy use suggests a path toward future memory technologies that could far outperform anything previously demonstrated."Lindenberg led a 19-member team, including researchers at SLAC, who detailed their experiments in Physical Review Letters.Their findings provide new insights into the experimental technology of phase-change memory.Entering a new phaseToday memory chips are commonly based on silicon technologies that efficiently switch electron flows on and off, representing the ones and zeroes that drive digital software. But researchers continue searching for new materials and processes that use less energy and require less space than silicon solutions.Phase-change memory is one possible next-generation technology. Scientists have known for some time that certain materials have flexible atomic structures that offer interesting electronic possibilities.For instance, phase-change materials can exist in two different atomic structures, each of which has a different electronic state. A crystalline, or ordered, atomic structure, permits the flow of electrons, while an amorphous, or disordered, structure inhibits electron flows.Researchers have developed ways to flip-flop the structural and electronic states of these materials – changing their phase from one to zero and back again – by applying short bursts of heat, supplied electrically or optically.Phase-change materials are attractive as a memory technology because they retain whichever electronic state conforms to their structure. Once their atoms flip or flop to form a one or a zero, the material stores that data until another energy jolt causes it to change. This ability to retain stored data makes phase-change memory nonvolatile just like the silicon-based flash memory in smartphones.But permanent storage is only one desired attribute. A next-generation memory technology also needs to perform certain operations faster than today's chips. By using extremely precise measurements and instrumentation, the researchers sought to demonstrate the speed and energy potential of phase-change technology – and what they found was encouraging."Nobody had ever been able to investigate these processes on such fast time-scales before," Lindenberg said.A faster phaseThe new research focused on the unimaginably brief interval when an amorphous structure began to switch to crystalline, when a digital zero became a digital one. This intermediate phase – where the charge flows through the amorphous structure like in a crystal – is known as "amorphous on."In the presence of a sophisticated detection system, the Stanford researchers jolted a small sample of amorphous material with an electrical field comparable in strength to a lightning strike. Their instrumentation detected that the amorphous-on state – initiating the flip from zero to one – occurred less than a picosecond after they applied the jolt.To comprehend the brevity of a picosecond, it's roughly the time it would take for a beam of light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, to pass through two pieces of paper.Showing that phase-change materials can be transformed from zero to one by a picosecond excitation suggests that this emerging technology could store data many times faster than silicon RAM for tasks that require memory and processors to work together to perform computations.Space is always a consideration in design, and previous experiments have shown that phase-change technology has the potential to pack more data in less space, giving it a favorable storage density.Taking energy into account, researchers say the electrical field that triggered the phase change was of such a brief duration that it points toward a storage process that could become more efficient than today's silicon-based technologies.Finally, although this experiment did not establish precisely how much time would be required to completely flip an atomic arrangement from amorphous to crystalline or back, these results suggest that phase-change materials could perform superfast memory chores and permanent storage – depending on how long the thermal excitation is engineered to stay inside the material.Much work remains to turn this discovery into functioning memory systems. Nonetheless, attaining such speed using a low-energy switching technique on a material that can store more information in less space suggests that phase-change technology has the potential to revolutionize data storage."A new technology which demonstrate a thousandfold advantage over incumbent technologies is compelling," Lindenberg said. "I think we've shown that phase change deserves further attention.Written by Tom Abate