Micron and AgigA to develop nonvolatile DIMM technology

SuperComputing 2012 USA: Micron Technology Inc. and AgigA Tech Inc., a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and a leading provider of high-speed, high-density, battery-free nonvolatile memory solutions, announced that the two companies have signed an agreement to collaborate to develop and offer nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM) products.

The partnership will leverage the strengths of the respective companies, with Micron's expertise in memory IC, module development, and manufacturing, and AgigA Tech's substantial IP and patent position in the area of hybrid nonvolatile RAM technology.

As part of the agreement, Micron will offer to their customers an NVDIMM module that will pair with AgigA Tech's power modules, based on ultracapacitors (PowerGEM), to create a complete NVDIMM solution. NVDIMM technology provides performance, cost and data security advantages for a wide range of applications, including server RAIDs, storage tiering, data logging, de-duplication, system checkpointing and metadata processing.

NVDIMMs enable fast, persistent main memory for high-performance computing applications. By combining industry-standard DRAM and NAND Flash technology, NVDIMMs provide the low latency and nearly infinite endurance of DRAM, along with the nonvolatility of Flash.

During normal operation, the NVDIMM appears to the host system as a standard JEDEC DRAM memory module. In the event of an unexpected power loss, the critical data residing in the DRAM is saved to onboard NAND Flash using a battery-free power source based on ultracapacitors. When power is returned, the in-memory state of the DRAM at the time power was lost is restored from the Flash.

The recovery time from a catastrophic power-loss event is almost immediate since the restore operation takes a matter of seconds and recharging the ultracapacitors takes only minutes. NVDIMMs are designed to integrate easily into the DIMM slots of industry-standard server and storage platforms, providing persistent memory for use cases such as write caching and metadata storage.