Flash, Meet Phase-Change Memory
Pick up a cell phone, smartphone, or MP3 player, and there’s a good chance you’re holding a device with flash memory in your hand. Flash comes in many names and forms — CompactFlash, Secure Digital, and Memory Stick, among others — but no matter what its name or what company makes it, it works the same. Just slip a chip the size of one or two postage stamps into your device and you have gigabytes of storage for music, movies, photos, e-books, and more.
Just this week Sony and SanDisk announced a new flash stick that can store a whopping 32 GB — larger than some hard drives and barely the size of a two-year-old’s finger. “No one has ever gone broke overestimating the public’s storage needs,” said Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at research firm Current Analysis. “Eight or 16 GB of storage seems perfectly reasonable for even a modest music collection,” he added, noting that photos, TV, and streaming videos “chew up huge chunks of storage.”
But even Sony’s new drive — and everything like it — might be obsolesced in the next five years by a new alloy created by IBM and partners, and unveiled this week at a San Francisco meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Flash, Meet Phase
The alloy is part of a growing field of research called phase-change memory. PCM is common in today’s CD-ROM and DVD drives, where a laser is used to change the physical state of a disc — that is, it’s phase — as a means of storing data.
Just so with IBM’s new PCM alloy, also called GS for the two elements — germanium and antimony — that make it up. With heat, the GS alloy moves between amorphous and crystalline states, reproducing the ones and zeroes…
