IBM Introduces Flash Memory Killer
An innovative new memory technology that promises to replace flash in a wide range of products has been unveiled by IBM and two partners who claim their phase-change technology is 500 times faster than flash and draws roughly half the power.
The principal advantage of this phase-change technology is that, like flash, it is nonvolatile, meaning information can be stored when the power is turned off. But memory built with the phase-change technology, according to Big Blue, also can read and write data at the same speed as existing RAM.
Researchers at IBM, Macronix, and Qimonda contend that the technology, which can be scaled to dimensions smaller than flash, might eventually become the universal memory format for mobile devices, such as laptops and mobile phones.
New Chip Material
The prototype memory chip is just 3 x 20 nanometers in size, and consists of a germanium-antimony semiconductor alloy created at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. It will be officially unveiled this week at an Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) meeting in San Francisco.
Phase-change materials are widely used in optical storage media, such as DVD rewritable discs. In these discs, it is the reflectivity of the material that changes, with a laser being used both to heat the material to the required temperature to switch it between its amorphous and crystalline phases and to detect the change in reflectivity.
The phase-change technology is still in the development stage for memory chips, with usable products expected to begin emerging in about five years. But the research shows potential for using the high-speed, high-density data storage in almost any device requiring fast, nonvolatile memory.
Flash Killer?
Most flash memory used today has a “floating gate” charge-storing cell. As a result, flash retains its stored data and requires power only to read, write, or erase information….
