Leap-frogging Moore's Law, scientists from IBM Corp. will announce on Wednesday a prototype of a new type of memory device that has the potential to replace flash memory in mobile devices such as music players, cell phones, and digital cameras.
Called "phase-change memory," the new technology runs more than 500 times faster than today's flash memory while using less than half the power to store information. Like flash, phase-change memory is "non-volatile" in that it retains data even when power to the device is switched off.
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In other words, unlike flash, phase-change memory technology can improve as it gets smaller. The prototype device has a cross section of 3 nanometers (nm) by 20 nm, far smaller than flash can be built today and equaling the industry's chip-making size goals for 2015.
Because it uses so much less power, the new technology could also help solve the battery-life limitations now facing mobile-device makers.
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Built around a core of a sophisticated alloy of germanium and antimony, phase-change memory devices work by alternating between a crystalline, ordered "phase," or arrangement of atoms, and a random, "amorphous" phase. An electrical pulse triggers the rapid shift by heating the alloy almost to the melting point.
So powerful and economic is phase-change memory, at least in theory, that it is seen as a possible replacement for disk drives in computers.
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