IBM Announces Memory Chip Advancement

A new semiconductor alloy jointly developed by scientists at IBM, Qimonda, and Micronix will spur the development of faster and smaller memory chips. The companies say the advancements would lead to smaller chips than currently possible with flash memory.

Called "phase-change" memory, in laboratory tests it proved to be as much as 500 times faster than flash. In addition, it takes one-half the power to write the data to the chip; size benefits are also to be had with the new technology.

IBM expects to be able to produce chips at a size of three by 20 nanometers, which is significantly smaller than any flash device, and is where that industry aims to be by the year 2015. The technology could potentially be included in a future version of the Power PC chip, it said.

"Many expect flash memory to encounter significant scaling limitations in the near future," IBM Research Science and Technology vice president Dr. T.C. Chen said in a statement. "Today we unveil a new phase-change memory material that has high performance even in an extremely small volume. This should ultimately lead to phase-change memories that will be very attractive for many applications."

Several companies in addition to IBM are working on alternatives to flash. Such a move has the potential to be extremely profitable; sales of the popular memory solution are now a $18.6 billion USD business, and are used in a variety of devices from MP3 players to mobile phones.

Intel and STMicroelectronics are working on their own solution, and Samsung is also researching new methods for non-volatile memory chips. Solutions from the former are expected in 2007, and the latter a year later.

Analysts and industry executives alike hope the new discoveries will help spur development in the consumer electronics industry. Many feared that current technologies were nearing their engineering limits, but phase-change memory has the potential to shatter that barrier.