Crossbar says it will explode the $60B flash memory market with Resistive RAM, which stores a terabyte on a chip
Crossbar is announcing today a new kind of memory chip that can replace flash memory, one of the fundamental building blocks of digital electronics, in a number of of applications.
Context & Ripple Effects
Crossbar's announcement lands in a field littered with earlier 'flash successor' claims: IBM unveiled a magnetic-memory chip back in 2006, Ars Technica floated quantum dots as perfect memory in 2007, and IBM returned in 2011 with Racetrack memory built on existing fabrication tools. None of those dislodged flash, which is why Crossbar's specific numbers matter — a terabyte on a single chip aimed squarely at a $60B market.
First-order effects
- Crossbar's immediate challenge is proof: its terabyte-on-a-chip claim now needs working silicon and a manufacturing path before OEM designers will design out flash, and the unusually wide same-day pickup across GigaOM, PC World, The Register, ZDNet, EE Times and others shows how much attention rides on that demonstration.
Second-order effects
- Every flash incumbent and every rival next-gen memory program — including IBM's Racetrack effort — gets pulled back into the conversation as buyers and investors ask whether post-flash memory is finally commercially real rather than lab-bound.
Third-order effects
- If resistive memory reaches cost parity with flash, the boundary between storage-class and working memory blurs, reshaping how systems are architected around a single non-volatile tier; if it does not, this becomes one more entry in the two-decade cycle of claimed flash replacements dating back at least to the 2006 magnetic-memory unveiling.
The trend: The industry keeps cycling through claimed flash successors — magnetic, quantum-dot, Racetrack, and now Resistive RAM — because whoever breaks NAND's $60B incumbency captures the fundamental building block of digital electronics.