ULTRARAM's inventor tells us why the revolutionary RAM replacement could slay dumb memory DIMMs

pcgamer.com:

As we explained earlier in the week, ULTRARAM looks like the messiah of memory technologies. Said to be at least as fast as RAM but with lower power demands, it also matches the non-volatile characteristics of flash, only this stuff lasts a thousand years and was seemingly branded by Douglas Adams' dearly departed soul. Anyone for some Brockian Ultra-Cricket? Anyway, ULTRARAM, what's not to like?

Well, the baffling and indeed equally Adams-esque technicalities of the nascent technology, such as triple-barrier resonant tunnelling structures presumably conceived by super-intelligent shades of the colour blue, do make ULTRARAM rather tricky to sense check as a mere lay observer. But more pertinently, there are some pretty obvious questions around real-world practicalities.

After all, Intel and Micron had a pretty similar narrative around the 3D XPoint technology which formed the basis of the Optane line of SSDs and memory persistent storage memory DIMMs. But that didn't go well, did it?

So, if Intel couldn't make Optane work, what hope an independent start up? To find out, we spoke to someone who ought to have a decent idea. None other than Manus Hayne, physics professor at Lancaster University in the UK. Oh, and he's also the inventor of ULTRARAM. Handy.

Professor Hayne's research interests are focused on the physics of low-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures, and exploiting those features in the development of novel devices. That has lead to his invention of ULTRARAM, a compound semiconductor-based rival to system memory with the properties and performance of DRAM and flash memories.

First up, that Intel Optane parallel, what does Hayne make of it?

«There is no doubt that there is a huge challenge ahead,» says Hayne.