Posted on 12/11/2006 9:19:10 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - 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 "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used "flash" 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."
. . . which compares with the speed of computer cache memory of the cpu exactly how?
Come back next year and we might be ready for that one....
I am guessing they may go after cell phones first and maybe iPOD type devices.,....
BFL
Alloy Holds Out Promise of Speedier Memory Chip
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If the technology proves cheap enough to manufacture, it will create a new competitor in the $18.6 billion market for the inexpensive erasable memory chips that have proliferated in mobile phones, music players and other consumer gadgets in recent years.
Moreover, although I.B.M. has withdrawn from the memory chip business, the company said it was intensely interested in the technology for corporate computing applications like transaction processing. Faster nonvolatile memory could change the design of the microprocessors that I.B.M. makes, speeding up a variety of basic operations.
The new memory technology could potentially be added to a future generation of the I.B.M. Power PC microprocessor, according to Spike Narayan, a senior manager at the company’s Almaden Research Center here.
Over two and a half years, in a trial-and-error process, scientists here explored a class of materials that can be switched from an amorphous state to a crystalline one and then back again by repeated heating. The compounds, known as GST, or germanium-antimony-tellurium phase change materials, are routinely used today to make inexpensive optical disks that are read from and written to with laser beams.
The I.B.M.-led team has proved that the same effect can be realized by using a small electrical current. That has made it possible to build tiny memory cells that can store digital 1’s and 0’s by means of electricity rather than light. I.B.M. scientists say the new material is an alloy composed of just germanium and antimony, and is referred to as GS. The scientists do not describe the material in detail in the paper.
The advantage of the new material, according to the scientists, is that it can be used to create switches more than 500 times as fast as today’s flash chips. Moreover, the prototype switch developed by the scientists is just 3 nanometers high by 20 nanometers wide, offering the promise that the technology can be shrunk to smaller dimensions than could be attained by flash manufacturers.
The current generation of flash memory chips store as much as 32 billion bits on a chip. But that technology is likely to become increasingly problematic as chip makers struggle to reach ever finer dimensions.
[Reached for comment later last week, Vivek Subramanian, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who has read the technical paper describing the project, said, “Everybody recognizes that scaling flash is going to be a problem in the long run. This looks like a really attractive technology that is both scaleable and consumes little power.”
[Industry executives said that the new materials might bolster the computer and consumer electronics industries just when it appeared they were nearing fundamental engineering limits.
[“This is a Christmas present for the industry because it shatters so many things at once,” said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a computer industry consulting firm in Seaford, N.Y., who has been briefed on the technical paper. “This could change the basic equation between processors, local storage and communications.”]
Today’s flash memories are largely divided into two distinct types called NOR and NAND, with different performance characteristics. The principal disadvantage of the flash design is that data cannot be addressed one bit at a time but only in larger blocks of data.
In contrast, phase change memories will be addressable at the bit level. Such a capability means that the new memories will be more flexible than flash memory and can be used in a wider variety of applications and computer designs.
See #25...
Promising New Memory Chip Technology Demonstrated by IBM, Macronix & Qimonda Joint Research Team
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Article for International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM) 12:01 AM most recent headlines Promising New Memory Chip Technology Demonstrated by IBM, Macronix & Qimonda Joint Research Team MONDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2006 12:01 AM - BusinessWire IBM 93.64 -0.22 News Enter Symbol: Enter Keyword: SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 11, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda today announced joint research results that give a major boost to a new type of computer memory with the potential to be the successor to flash memory chips, which are widely used in computers and consumer electronics like digital cameras and portable music players. The advancement heralds future success for "phase-change" memory, which appears to be much faster and can be scaled to dimensions smaller than flash - enabling future generations of high-density "non-volatile" memory devices as well as more powerful electronics. Non-volatile memories do not require electrical power to retain their information. By combining non-volatility with good performance and reliability, this phase-change technology may also enable a path toward a universal memory for mobile applications.
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Working together at IBM Research labs on both U.S. coasts, the scientists designed, built and demonstrated a prototype phase-change memory device that switched more than 500 times faster than flash while using less than one-half the power to write data into a cell. The device's cross-section is a minuscule 3 by 20 nanometers in size, far smaller than flash can be built today and equivalent to the industry's chip-making capabilities targeted for 2015. This new result shows that unlike flash, phase-change memory technology can improve as it gets smaller with Moore's Law advancements.
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The new material is a complex semiconductor alloy created in an exhaustive search conducted at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. It was designed with the help of mathematical simulations specifically for use in phase-change memory cells.
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Technical details
A computer memory cell stores information -- a digital "zero" or "one" -- in a structure that can be rapidly switched between two readily discernible states. Most memories today are based on the presence or absence of electrical charge contained in a tiny confined region of the 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 supply is interrupted.
Most flash memory used today has a "floating gate" charge-storing cell that is designed not to leak. As a result, flash retains its stored data and requires power only to read, write or erase information. This "non-volatile" characteristic makes flash memory popular in battery-powered portable electronics. Non-volatile data retention would also be a big advantage in general computer applications, but writing data onto flash memory is thousands of times slower than DRAM or SRAM. Also, flash memory cells degrade and become unreliable after being rewritten about 100,000 times. This is not a problem in many consumer uses, but is another show-stopper for using flash in applications that must be frequently rewritten, such as computer main memories or the buffer memories in networks or storage systems. A third concern for flash's future is that it may become extremely difficult to keep its current cell design non-volatile as Moore's Law shrinks its minimum feature sizes below 45 nanometers.
The IBM/Macronix/Qimonda joint project's phase-change memory achievement is important because it demonstrates a new non-volatile phase-change material that can switch more than 500 times faster than flash memory, with less than one-half the power consumption, and, most significantly, achieves these desirable properties when scaled down to at least the 22-nanometer node, two chip-processing generations beyond floating-gate flash's predicted brick wall.
At the heart of phase-change memory is a tiny chunk of a semiconductor alloy that can be changed rapidly between an ordered, crystalline phase having lower electrical resistance to a disordered, amorphous phase with much higher electrical resistance. Because no electrical power is required to maintain either phase of the material, phase-change memory is non-volatile.
The material's phase is set by the amplitude and duration of an electrical pulse that heats the material. When heated to a temperature just above melting, the alloy's energized atoms move around into random arrangements. Suddenly stopping the electrical pulse freezes the atoms into a random, amorphous phase. Turning the pulse off more gradually - over about 10 nanoseconds - allows enough time for the atoms to rearrange themselves back into the well-ordered crystalline phase they prefer.
The new memory material is a germanium-antimony alloy (GeSb) to which small amounts of other elements have been added (doped) to enhance its properties. Simulation studies enabled the researchers to fine-tune and optimize the material's properties and to study the details of its crystallization behavior. A patent has been filed covering the composition of the new material.
Illustrations:
-- Five still images: http://media.almaden.ibm.com/images/phase_change_memory_photos
-- Two animation files: http://media.almaden.ibm.com/images/phase_change_memory/
SOURCE: IBM
IBM Michael Ross, 408-927-1283 (USA) mikeross@almaden.ibm.com or Macronix Michelle Chang, 886-3-578-6688 x71233 (Taiwan) michellechang@mxic.com.tw or Qimonda Christoph Liedtke, +49 (89) 23421578 (Germany) christoph.liedtke@qimonda.com
Me too,I have to have my reading glasses when I go anywhere,instructions,directions and most of all I need glasses when I go to the bathroom!!!!
"The processor is gonna be inside the Big Buttons at this rate...."
haha!
just give us big buttons!
I'm a retired chip-maker and I made the same comment this past week-end. Everything you touch these days has a thousand minature buttons on it that I have no idea how to use. My DirecTV remote has 36 buttons on it...my son has a PhD (physics) and even he doesn't know what they're all for. lol.
"the older the boomers get, they will have the same problem."
Damn! How did you know?
Ever try to read a map late at night in a car with the overhead light? Type faces so tiny even a magnifier won't work.
Are there really people who can read microscopic type faces?
I just love buying multiple pairs of reading glasses, losing them, breaking them, forgetting them.
"What a drag it is getting old" Rolling Stones, the 60's.
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