Thanks for these finds, Green88!

I think the study's abstract is well worth citing (emphasis by me, see below):

"We find that DRAM error behavior in the field differs in many key aspects from commonly held assumptions. For example, we observe DRAM error rates that are orders of magnitude higher than previously reported, with 25,000 to 70,000 errors per billion device hours per Mbit and more than 8% of DIMMs affected by errors per year. We provide strong evidence that memory errors are dominated by hard errors, rather than soft errors, which previous work suspects to be the dominant error mode. We find that temperature, known to strongly impact DIMM error rates in lab conditions, has a surprisingly small effect on error behavior in the field, when taking all other factors into account. Finally, unlike commonly feared, we don’t observe any indication that newer generations of DIMMs have worse error behavior."

And here's a more detailed summary of the study: http://arstechnica.com/business/2009/10/dram-study-turns-assumptions-about-errors-upside-down/

However, if POET Technologies claims "several orders of magnitude improvement in soft error rates" this sounds better than it actually is, because according to the study the overall error rate is dominated by hard errors rather than soft errors. There are much more hard errors (caused by chip defects) than soft errors (caused by cosmic rays). With higher altitudes and especially in space soft errors become more dominant, however.

It will be interesting to see how POET memory will behave with respect to hard errors!

Anyway, I strongly believe we investors haven't fully digested the importance of POET memory yet. Aside from error rates the vanishing difference between DRAM, SRAM and NVRAM is huge! Memory contents will remain even if power is lost. Imagine you can switch off your computer completely – or you experience a power outage (which, by the way, here in Germany is more likely today and in the future than in the past due to our infamous Energiewende (energy transition)) –, and when you turn it on again everything is exactly as you left it!