Memory chip breakthrough for electronic devices ~ "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster

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."

Earlier article from Science news:

Morphing Memory
Superfast atom shuffling inspires data-storage alternatives

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Peter Weiss

Anyone who purchases an electronic camera, cell phone, voice recorder, travel disk, or PDA, typically brings home a stick, card, or some other medium containing a chip ready to store information via a technology known as flash memory. Last year, consumers worldwide bought almost $12 billion worth of flash products, which depend on electrons to store data. The semiconductor industry expects global demand to surpass $18 billion by 2007.

Nonvolatile memory systems, in which data remain intact even when the power is off, are widespread as the magnetic-disk drives of computers. More recently, portable consumer products have taken advantage of nonvolatile memory provided by fast, high-capacity microchips. In these products, flash rules.

Although camera buffs, for instance, can today store hundreds of images on a stamp-size chip costing less than $100, they're demanding more data-dense, cheaper storage components. Engineers working to create the next generation of data-storage devices consider flash to be "the technology to beat," says Matthias Wuttig of RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

Several technologies have potential to dominate the future of microchip nonvolatile memory. The newest contender relies on a principle already at work in any computer that can burn a rewritable CD. A laser heats spots on an inner layer of the CD to between 300°C and 600°C for a few nanoseconds. That's all it takes to rearrange the atoms in that layer in a way that imprints one bit of digital data—the proverbial 1 or 0. Over the past decade, phase-change material, a class of silvery semiconductors about as soft as lead, has emerged as a star ingredient of write-your-own optical disks.

Now, researchers are striving to recast electronic memory chips by taking advantage of this material. Rather than accumulating electrons to store data, these upcoming chips instantly toggle patches of atoms between order and disorder.

What makes phase-change material particularly suitable for fast-memory devices is that it "can go from amorphous to crystalline [or back] with minimum motion of the atoms," notes Gary A. Gibson of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif. Consequently, it can switch with lightning speed between arrangements that have dramatically different optical properties or electrical resistances. "This is really magic," Wuttig says.

Phase-change memory developers are resurrecting a decades-old invention that was eclipsed by the success of such materials in optical disks. In the 1960s, Stanford R. Ovshinsky of Energy Conversion Devices in Rochester Hills, Mich., made the seminal discoveries that revealed the potential for those materials to be a medium for electronic—as well as optical—data storage.

Scientific and commercial interest in the electronic version of the technology has exploded in the past few years, Ovshinsky says. That version is known as phase-change random access memory, or ovonic memory, in reference to Ovshinsky. Those who are most bullish about it, forecast that the technology could end up stealing not only flash-memory markets but also those now dominated by volatile-memory technologies, such as the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and static random access memory (SRAM) used by computers.

It's elementary

Although in the kitchen, making ice cubes and softening butter aren't the speediest operations, freezing and melting serve as the basis for the new form of fast computer memory. On microscopic scales, materials can freeze and melt at blinding speeds. Associating 1 or 0 with each of these states of matter provide the makings of memory.

Compounds known as chalcogenides have opened new vistas of data storage because of the changes they undergo when suddenly heated. At the heart of each of those compounds is one or more of such elements as sulfur, selenium, and tellurium—which appear in oxygen's column of the periodic table—combined with other semiconducting or metal-like elements such as germanium, indium, and antimony.

In optical disks, a laser's heat switches a chalcogenide patch between an orderly crystalline form and a more disordered, amorphous one. Because the mirrorlike crystalline patches bounce light in a given direction than the somewhat translucent, amorphous patches do, a detector in a CD or DVD player can almost flawlessly discern which bits are 1s and which are Os.

And the other other company mentioned is a spinoff from Infineon,....:

Qimonda AG

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Qimonda in a nutshell
Qimonda AG is the second largest global supplier of DRAM memory products (Ranking first half of the calendar year 2006 according to the industry research firm Gartner Dataquest). Following the carve out from Infineon Technologies AG on May 1st, 2006, Qimonda went public at the New York Stock Exchange on August 9th, 2006. The company generated net sales of €3.81 billion in its 2006 financial year and has approximately 12,000 employees worldwide. Qimonda has access to five 300mm manufacturing sites on three continents and operates five major R&D facilities, including its lead R&D center in Dresden. The company is a leading supplier of DRAM products to PC and server manufacturers and is increasingly focusing on products for graphics, mobile and consumer applications as well using its power saving trench technology

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