t e c h i e - t a l k s ::: technology at its best

In the next 18 month or so, a new nano-tech device will be made commercial which will eventually phase out flash based memory storage in your portable devices.

A new type of memory device may “out-store” your current thumbdrives, flash cards and even store more than your conventional hard disk drives. The best part is that this technology is so efficient that it only uses 1% the amount of energy consumed by an average memory device today.

This new technology called programmable-metallization-cell (PMC) memory, or nano-ionic memory is being tested and researched in the University of Arizona and giant companies such as Sony and IBM. This technology is said to be one of the best candidate to replace the current flash memory is portable devices, dynamic random access-memory (DRAM) used in PCs today and even conventional hard disk drives. PMC memory can be made by using materials conventionally used in computer memory chips and microprocessors.

On top of that, PMCs are said to be consume extremely low voltages, thus consuming a thousandth as much energy as a flash drive. Therefore, PMCs can achieve higher densities (by getting more bits per unit area) than other available technology. According to Michael Kozicki, a professor at the University of Arizona,

These attractions are largely the result of a new mechanism for storing information. Flash memory stores bits of information as electrical charge, but the smaller the memory cells that hold the bits, the less charge they can hold, and the less reliable they become. The new memory stores information by rearranging atoms to form stable, and potentially extremely small, memory cells. What’s more, each cell could potentially store multiple bits of information, and the cells can be layered on top of each other, increasing the memory’s storage density to the point that it might rival that of the densest form of memory today: hard drives.

Each memory cell consists of a solid electrolyte sandwiched between two metal electrodes. The electrolyte is a glasslike material that contains metal ions. Ordinarily, the electrolyte resists the flow of electrons. But when a voltage is applied to the electrodes, electrons bind to the metal ions, forming metal atoms that cluster together. These atoms form a virus-sized filament that bridges the electrodes, providing a path along which electrical current can flow. Reversing the voltage causes the wire to “dissolve”. The highly resistive state of the electrolyte and the other, low-resistance, state can be used to represent zeroes and ones. Because the metal filament stays in place until it’s erased, nano-ionic memory is nonvolatile, meaning that it doesn’t require energy to hold on to information, just to read it or write it.

However, nano-ionic memory may still have quite a long way to go before it can be considered a mature and stable technology to replace the current memory storage devices. Firstly, there might be a difficulty in adopting the technology. Secondly, the best nano-ionic memory technology uses materials that are unconventional to normal manufacturing of microchips and memories. Thus, this would make the technology more costly to manufacture and hence, less attractive to other competitive memory technology such as the phase-change memory.