Melting memory chips in mass production

HollyMinkowski

The Article said...

South Korean manufacturer Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals.

the smaller each crystal cell in the device, the faster it becomes. Wuttig's group has recently conducted experiments with cells just 20 nanometres across. These cells can be switched in just 16 nanoseconds

Proponents hope that PCM could eventually take a substantial share of the flash memory market, worth more than $20 billion in 2008.

the technology is developing quickly, and given the advantages of PCM and the increasing difficulties of shrinking flash, Atwood says that he thinks crystal memory will become commonplace in just a few years. "We believe it is the next generation,"

www.nature.com/news/2009/090925/full/news.2009.951.html



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PFloyd36069

crazy stuff.....

Unknown

The question remains how many times these crystals can be frozen and melted and how does that compare to the length and longevity of the old flash memory? Will extreme temperatures change the state of the data?

LoopyByteloose

A bit weird. Changing phase from solid to liquid is likely to be much slower and more temperature sensitive that changing an electric charge. In general theromdynamics is more messy, harder to contain than electronics.

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aka G. Herzog [noparse][[/noparse] 黃鶴 ] in Taiwan

Alsowolfman

The process in not just converting it into a liquid, it is melted, and then the molecules are either aligned into a conducting crystal, or left as unaligned amorphous material which has a higher resistance. the high and low states are both solids, just with different resistance, so i think that they would be fine in the cold. Speedwise the journal article says that they can write in less than 60 ns as opposed to flash which takes 10 us. the article also estimates that "At 55 °C, crystal
growth would lead to a shift in the interface by only 2 nm in 10 yr" the total samples were >20 nm so that would mean that over a 10 year period the high resistance area would reduce in resistance by only a fraction.