500 to 1,000 faster then Flash

[Nflight]

Memory chip breakthrough for electronic devices: by Glenn Chapman 2 hours, 14 minutes ago A team of scientists has announced a breakthrough in computer memory technology that heralded more sophisticated and reliable MP3 players, digital cameras and other devices. Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used memory, while using half as much power. You can do a lot of things with this phase-change memory that you can't do with flash, IBM senior manager of nanoscale science Spike Narayan told AFP. You can replace disks, do instant-on computers, or carry your own fancy computer application in your hand. It would complement smaller technology if manufacturers wanted to conjure things up. Technical details of the research were to be presented to engineers gathered at the 2006 International Electronic Devices Meeting in San Francisco. Researchers expected the discovery to anoint phase-change memory the successor to flash memory as the electronics industry continues a relentless quest to make devices smaller and more powerful. These results dramatically demonstrate that phase-change memory has a very bright future, said IBM vice president of technology T.C. Chen. Many expect flash memory to encounter significant scaling limitations in the near future. Today we unveil a new phase-change memory material that has high performance even in an extremely small volume. The new material was a complex semiconductor alloy that resulted from collaborative research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose, California. Qimonda memory technology firm is based in Germany and Macronix is a non-volatile memory company located in Taiwan. Computer memory cells store information as sequences of digital zeros and ones in structures that can be rapidly switched between two distinctive states. Most computer memory devices are based on the presence or absence of electrical charge contained in a tiny region of a cell. The fastest and most economical memory designs -- SRAM and DRAM, respectively -- use inherently leaky memory cells, so they must be powered continuously and, in case of DRAM, refreshed frequently as well. These volatile memories lose their stored information whenever their power supplies are interrupted. At the heart of phase-change memory is a tiny chunk of alloy that can be changed rapidly between an ordered, crystalline phase and a disordered, amorphous phase. Because no electrical power is required to maintain either phase of the material, phase-change memory is non-volatile. This is a much more robust memory technology, Narayan said. It will be used more and more as flash gets into more and more trouble at small dimensions. While the semiconductor alloy from Almaden is new, phase-change technology has been around for decades and has been used in DVDs and CDs, according to researchers. Samsung and Intel have both been working with phase-change memory devices, according to Narayan. We have demonstrated the potential of the phase-change memory technology on very small dimensions laying out a scalability path, said Qimonda vice president Wilhelm Beinvogl. Phase-change memories have the clear potential to play an important role in future memory systems. I copied from this URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061211...4556&printer=1

[Steve Lux]

I saw an article about this technology in PC magazine as one of their chosen technologies of the year for 2006. Another issue concerning modern RAM is that it needs to be forced to a "0" state prior to re-writing, which also takes time.

You know when the 3-second boot-up was mentioned I thought of this technology, but then remembered that bloat-ware knows no bounds. Initially it will be fast, but there is always more stuff to stuff into the available ram. Hence the "good luck" comment concerning the 3-second boot.