DRAM

“I knew of him for years before I came to IBM. I only knew of his accomplishments, and that was very intimidating at first. I thought, Here’s the man who invented DRAM. This guy is famous. ... He was not the way I imagined him at all.”

“Memory technology development, in particular dynamic random access memory (DRAM), has been the greatest driving force in the advancement of solid-state technology for integrated circuit development over the last 40 years. ... This truly visionary work, using a single transistor and capacitor (the 1T1C), is one of the most manufactured devices in the history of mankind.”

“I really wasn’t that involved in scientific things until I really came to IBM and they handed me a patent notebook and said ‘put all your ideas in there.’”

“I had the idea that I might come for a few years and learn the tricks of the trade. But things here are so much fun I never thought about going anywhere else.”

“We found that if we reduced all of the dimensions of this device simultaneously … these much smaller transistors would really work. They would switch on and off cleanly just like the bigger versions. And then we discovered there were several important advantages. Besides being much denser, and therefore they should be very low cost, they would also operate faster, directly in proportion to how small they became.”

“Sometimes, when someone meets me in an elevator and says ‘Oh, you’re the guy who invented DRAM,’ it takes me aback a little bit. But I’m becoming a bit more comfortable with … the reality, that the work that I’ve been involved with and many other people have been involved with for the last 35 or so years has really made a tremendous impact on the world … in just every conceivable way.”

“The implications of scaling were remarkable. … These were exactly the results we needed to develop a competitive low cost memory … we were convinced that MOSFET memory would replace fixed head files. Further, we speculated that it may also replace moveable head disk storage for some applications. We also started to believe that the MOSFET would someday replace the bipolar transistor in high-performance logic and memory applications.”

“Without scaling theory, I doubt that Moore’s Law could have survived for more than three decades. … The scaling principle and Moore’s Law have been inseparable in terms of providing a driving force to technology research and development…”

“Scaling theory has been the organizing principle of the progress of the semiconductor industry throughout three decades. It has created a framework for continued improvement in density and cost performance and facilitated the desegregation of the entire industry around design and manufacturing. Few concepts in our time have had as much influence on the economy.”

"Fear of the demise of DRAM is overblown."