DRAM's Inventor Honored for Contribution

In the late 1960s, Dennard invented Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM, the memory used in virtually all computers today. Dennard followed in the mid-1970s with a groundbreaking paper describing how to keep shrinking transistors to build smaller, faster and less expensive chips. Dennard's "scaling theory" ( PDF document) is often ascribed to Moore's Law, when, as Dennard modestly puts it, "scaling and Moore's Law go very well together." Without the invention of DRAM, computer memory might be the technology laggard that hard-disk drives and laptop batteries remain today. As Dennard recalls it, the dominant memory used in IBM's mainframe computers of the late 1960s was magnetic core memory. Magnetic-core memory "was delicate like jewelry," Dennard said. Dennard was eventually able to create a memory cell that was able to store a charge (representing a bit of data) and keep it continually refreshed, all in a simple single-transistor package. Interest in DRAM has cooled, giving way to alternatives such as flash memory, used in solid-state disks (SSDs) and touted as an ultra-fast-albeit-still-thornyreplacement for hard-disk drives. More seriously, Dennard concedes that "a lot of people are hopeful that flash memory can play more of a role in basic computing as well."