IBM: Phase Change Memory
June 30th, 2011Via: PC World:
Solid-state flash memory is widely used as a storage medium in tons of consumer devices, from cell phones to laptops like the MacBook Air. While it has big advantages over hard drives in terms of speed and a lack of moving parts, it has a limited lifespan. Now IBM researchers say they’ve crafted a way of encoding data that works better than flash—and has a greatly increased lifespan.
The discovery is called phase-change memory (PCM), and where flash memory can typically be overwritten only 3,000 to 10,000 times, PCM can endure in the order of 10 million write-erase cycles. On top of that, its read-write performance is said to be up to 100 times that of today’s flash storage.
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It’s going to be a while before the technology is commercialized—IBM estimates about five years.
