EssayBoard

Flash memory is dominating the non-volatile computer storage market for now, but phase-change memory may change all that when it be ready for the market.  Intel and Numonyx are the two companies that focus on flash memory announce that they are creating a new prototype of phase-change memory.  Maybe in the future, flash memory will be no more and phase-change memory will take flash memory’s place.

Why phase-change memory but not flash?  The idea of phase-change memory has been around since 1970, but there were problems of material quality and power consumption that prevented the idea of phase-change memory to materialize.  Recently, those problems are no more as those have been overcome by Intel.  To be brief, phase-change memory could be shrink even smaller than flash memory could, and so this means capacity for phase-change memory is bigger.  Imagine a same size USB flash drive but using phase-change memory technology can have a much bigger memory capacity.  Phase-change memory is not susceptible to degradation by radiation as easy as flash memory.  Phase-change memory could last longer than flash memory.  Keeping phase-change memory at the right temperature (85°C), the data using phase-change memory could be around for at least 300 years.  Since phase-change memory is non-volatile type of memory as flash memory, this means phase-change memory does not lose data when power is turned off.  With bigger capacity but smaller in size means there is less power consumption, and so phase-change memory is not wasting power as much as flash memory.  Phase-change memory can also be faster than flash memory.  Quoting from Wikipedia:

PRAM can offer much higher performance in applications where writing quickly is important, both because the memory element can be switched more quickly, and also because single bits may be changed to either 1 or 0 without needing to first erase an entire block of cells. PRAM’s high performance, thousands of times quicker than conventional hard drives, make it particularly interesting in nonvolatile memory roles that are currently performance-limited by memory access timing.

It’s great to hear Intel is in progress of making phase-change memory becomes a reality.  Source: Cnet and Wikipedia.