Japanese Scientists Develop Long-Life Flash Memory 188
schliz writes "Flash memory chips with a potential lifetime of hundreds of years have been developed by Japanese scientists. The new chips also work at lower voltages than conventional chips, according to the scientists from the University of Tokyo. They are said to be scaleable down to at least 10 nm; current Flash chips wouldn't be usable below 20 nm."
Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
Crash-Proof Storage! (Score:2)
If you used wear-leveling on drives built like this, you could market Crash Proof Hard Drives! They could be constructed to be immune to shock, and wear-leveling could make them last many decades. Hot-swappable RAID appliances using these would be awesome.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
10nm get you anyting you want baby, me so info-dense, baby, me so info-dense. Me store you long time.
What is the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still better than the lifetime of most other electronic storage media. Obviously conservation efforts (i.e. duplication) would have to be made (at it's half life of 50 years I'd guess), but the same applies to film, paper, etc.
The advantage of digital media though is that multiple identical copies can be made, without any loss that can occur when duplicating analogue materials, and the cost of multiple digital copies over an extended period is almost certainly going to be considerably less than the cost of performing restoration and preservation on, for instance, a several hundred year old manuscript.
Re:What is the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would hardly call 100 years archival. In some exceptional cases its within the memory span of a single human individual.
Ummmm. Yea. I am going to have granny memorize my last ten years of photos, movies and financial records.
Fact is, I have struggled with a good method for backing up all of this. I've basically settled on mirroring with a remote FTP site. It works, but with my horrible upload speed, initial synchronization took 48 hours plus. Quarterly updates take a couple hours. And the other pain in the butt is I have to encrypt my financial info as I don't trust it being in the hands of a third party.
Now if I had a medium that were 99% successful at retaining info for 20 years, I would backup to two manufacturer's media, and stick it in my safety deposit box.
I don't have that degree of confidence in any low cost storage media yet.
So for archival, yes, this is a wonderful advance.
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Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm assuming you are under 30 and haven't lost a grandparent. Now that I have lost a few family members, I wish I had more photos, more memories to look through. Perhaps it is a case of you don't miss something till it is gone.
I will pull up the digital photo album of old vacations, and my kids love to remember what we did. At some point, my kids will become uninterested as I did when I was younger. But as some point, I know they will enjoy revisiting them.
I sure as hell don't want that to not be possible because my hard drive crashed.
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Really? Do you really consider the memory span of a human to be 100 years, even if they hit that age? And are we going to judge all our data to this process?
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> I would hardly call 100 years archival
You might not, but everyone else certainly does.
What do you think "archive" folders in Outlook are for? Emails older than 100 years?
Many companies archive financial records, which are then permanently destroyed after 5 or 10 years. There is very little you'd want to archive for much longer than this in the business world. Archived data is simply anything you don't foresee needing to use again. Even if you last used it last week - you might as well archive it if you
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You never worked for my old boss.
Re:What is the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
Archival. Once it's archived you can forget about it. For example, your local library doesn't convert all that old microfilm just because it can. It would only do it to put it onto a more stable storage medium.
At least until the technology changes so much that you can no longer buy anything that will read it, cf. the BBC's Doomsday project:
http://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?newsid=937 [iconbar.com]
Domesday, not Doomsday (Score:2, Insightful)
It's Domesday, not Doomsday. Judging from Wikipedia, the Domesday Book was, well, kind of like the first British census?
Thanks for the interesting link. One of the things which stuck out was:
Sadly, it is unlikely that Domesday will become available for the general public to use. The contents of the discs are heavily tied up in copyright - parts are owned by the BBC, the Ordinance Survey, and possibly the Local Education Authorities and schools.
Another example of how the inflexibility of copyright strangles reuse and archival of information.
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It could be argued that due to changes to layers above the physical storage medium, no physical storage solution can currently be considered archival. At this point in time, data needs to be constantly migrated.
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
it's to facilitate the new profession of 'data archaeologist'. People that will be sifting through the digital detritus of the pre-AI era two hundred years from now.
Looking for the rosetta's stone that will enable them to translate 'flash' into 'realmedia' ;)
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Oh, snap!
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Re:What is the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
The move where storage is going 'online' will mitigate this to some extent, at the same time it will create a larger problem is something goes wrong with all that online storage.
Storage reminds me of the situation around energy generation. If you all generate your own energy and consume it on the spot then there will be lots of outages, but small ones. If you do it centralized then you get less outages, but *MUCH* larger ones.
I fully expect something similar to happen to online storage, it will seem to be more reliable because on average it will be better than storing your data locally, but when it goes it will go bigtime.
That's when the data recovery guys will have a field day.
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Regular flash works just fine for swap. If you write nonstop at top speed to a standard chip, you'll wear I'd out in about fifty years. Thus I don't understand why we should care about an even longer lifetime.
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Regular flash works just fine for swap. If you write nonstop at top speed to a standard chip, you'll wear I'd out in about fifty years. Thus I don't understand why we should care about an even longer lifetime.
That used to be true with SLC chips. It's not true with MLC.
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html [storagesearch.com]
It's a simple matter to plug new data for MLCs into the calculation I did for the worst case wear-out process for flash SSDs - which I called the Rogue Data Recorder.
Instead of the 64GB example I used then, I'll assume the MLC SSD has 128GB capacity. MLC SSDs have more capacity than SLC. And more capacity means longer operating life - before cells wear out.
I'll still use the 80M bytes / sec sustained write speed - because the fastest MLC products (in Feb 2008) can already do that. (Meanwhile the fastest SLC products have moved up in the world and are about 50% faster.)
The next factor is where we hit the big problem... Instead of a write endurance rating of 2 million cycles (for the best SLC) - I can only use a figure of 10,000 for MLC. MLC has a much lower rating due to the complex interaction of discriminating multiple logic levels reliably coupled with the intrinsic failure mechanism of wear-out.
Plugging these numbers in the same calculation gives an estimated MLC flash SSD operating life (at max write throughput) which is 6 months! (instead of 51 years for a 64GB SLC SSD).
All the affordable SSDs I've seen from Intel and Samsung are based on MLC flash because it costs much less per bit [dramexchange.com]. Down to $2 per GB in fact. SLC currently costs 2-4x as much. E.g.
Here are the average prices for flash
32Gb 4Gx8 MLC 9.27
16Gb 2Gx8 SLC 15.61
16Gb 2Gx8 MLC 3.97
8Gb 1Gx8 SLC 6.31
8Gb 1Gx8 MLC 2.34
SLC is 2.7x more expensive for 1Gx8 and 3.9x more expensive for 2Gx8.
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Thanks for that information, I had no idea about MLC or its considerably reduced write cycle.
I would posit that in most real-world situations it still won't matter, though. That 6 months is at a 100% duty cycle doing nothing but writes. Even in a heavy-duty application, you'll come nowhere near, so that 6 months will be multiplied by a lot. But still, you're absolutely right that the theoretical limit is much lower than I said.
Of course SLC still exists, and still lasts essentially forever. For this new tec
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Well, flash drives are already launched, have been for quite a long time. They're not all that common for use as a boot drive, but it's pretty frequent. As an obvious example, the MacBook Air has an SSD option, and it will swap to that drive. I have no idea if it's MLC or SLC flash, although my money would be on MLC just because it's cheaper.
I'm sure you're right about early adopters getting burned. That's true of just about any time you have new technology, so it's to be expected. Hopefully people who need
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The extremely long duration comes from using wear leveling algorithms to spread the writes across the entire device. An individual cell, written to continuously, can be blown very rapidly, it's just that the controller hardware won't let you do that. So yes, I imagine that they have tested the lifetime of the individual cell, and then from that figure it's a simple calculation.
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I honestly don't know. If I were implementing it, I would use an algorithm that thrashed on the limited free space for a while, then moved unchanging files into it to create a different block of free space, which could then be thrashed on for a while as well. But I have no idea if that's what they actually do.
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Flash can't see files. It sees bare data blocks. Think on the hardware level; it can't read FAT.
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How do they work then? Obviously wear leveling is a reality, and unless it's going to perform two physical writes for every logical write (to swap blocks) it must have some concept of what areas are free.
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It doesn't matter what you write, because the logical sectors are not linked to the physical sectors on any reasonable flash drive. The controller circuitry holds a mapping which it adjusts as time goes by to evenly use the entire device no matter what your write patterns are.
As for "not much cheaper", this must be a new meaning of "not much" that I was previously unaware of. Taking a quick sample on newegg.com, I find an 8GB flash drive for $32, and 8GB of RAM going for around five to six times that. The f
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I guarantee you that the $32 8GB flash drive is not what you call 'reasonable'. Flash drives which actually do distribute wear across the whole drive no matter what your write pattern is are considerably more expensive. As a general rule, if it's a cheap USB flash key, it's built using MLC flash chips (only about 10K erase/write cycles per erase block), is slow (MLC is slow), and implements a fancy form of defect remapping rather than real wear leveling.
The problem a lot of people have is that they hear a
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A database for example would profit a lot from the huge random I/O speed boosts. The problem is of course that under any serious write load coupled with fsync, unless you're using BBWC, you're writing frequently to disk.
Also, with SSD going mainstream, the MTBF should increase for harddrives - I hope to see 5+ years of guarantees after the t
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Hmmm... that's an interesting one... What is the procedure for securely erasing a flash disk? 30 seconds in the microwave?
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Hammer delete (Score:2)
A good whack with a hammer should do it.
For hard drives, even damaged ones can be put back together if you do it carefully enough. I'm no specialist, but I doubt you could do that with ~50 shards of a flash chip.
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Second vote for hammer; there is nothing like good old bft [wikipedia.org] for making media unreadable.
No matter how many times you write 1's and 0's across your drive, it's not going to be as secure as a good whack with a sledgehammer.
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False. A whack on a hard drive is not as secure as the Gutmann Shredding Algorithm. A single scrape across a physical NAND cell is; but NAND uses a tunnel injection and tunnel release, so unless you reduce a chip uniformly to nano-scale dust, you might still have useful data somewhere that can be extracted by TEM. Highly unlikely that you could reconstruct sense from dust, but doable.
In either case, fire to melting works.
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Because currently an SSD will not last the life of your computer. At some stage prior to your processor wearing out, the disk will fail and you will lose data. At the moment, a mechanical HDD is still less likely to fail than an SSD.
We use them here at work in firewall applicances and I've so far yet to see an SSD last for longer than one year when the disk is used heavily to log network traffic. SSDs are absolutely rubbish for high usage (high read/write cycles). If you made one into a Usenet server for ex
if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
Stone tablets will last even longer!
Re:if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, even God can only fit 5 commands on a single stone tablet.
Re:if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
the fact that any three year old can do better is probably one of the stronger proofs that god, indeed, does not exist.
Or... (Score:5, Funny)
god, indeed, does not exist.
...Or is even less skilled than a toddler.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky... that's pretty damned impressive.
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that's the first time I've been laughing out loud at moderation... metamods please reward that mod :)
That's what flash looks like under a microscope (Score:3, Funny)
And that's why it wears out. Apparently.
Okay, then... (Score:2)
The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky...
Okay, then either god is less skilled than a toddler, or god is a fucking camping snipper.
Happy, now ?
Or... (Score:3, Insightful)
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google to the rescue:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%223+year+old+mason%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [google.com]
I make no warranties as to their skills though, caveat emptor.
Re:if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
It's not just like 'thou shalt not kill', each command is quite verbose.
Thou, hereby referred to as THE SINNER, shall not, under any circumstance, unless with the express permission of thy god, hereby referred as GOD, attempt to willfully, negligently or otherwise end the life of another...
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the George Carlin version fits on a much smaller space. Probably a good instance of data compression by removing redundancies (is there any other kind ?).
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I'm a polytheist you insensitive clod!
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Just because one exists doesn't mean that more can't exist too ;)
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Have you even seen the original 10 commandments? It's not just like 'thou shalt not kill', each command is quite verbose.
Actually, the Hebrew for "thou shalt not murder" is even shorter- it's only two words ("No murder"). Most of the second half is like that; it's really only the first few that are longer sentences.
Oh, as for the topic, better flash memory == good.
Re:if you write real small (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, even God can only fit 5 commands on a single stone tablet.
Its just as well. Imagine what Sunday School would have been like if Moses hat taken a PDA up mount Sinai and come back with the 65,536 commandments.
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People would still covet each other's wives and oxen?
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People would still covet each other's wives and oxen?
... And their manservert and their madeservernt, their laptop, high speed internet connection, their low digit slashdot ID and karma rating......
.... Thou shalt not use someone elses wifi where it diminisheth his download speed....
.... Thou shalt not post to Slashdot on the sabbath
It could go on.........
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come back with the 65,536 commandments.
Somebody hasn't read Leviticus or Deuteronomy.
Who needs FIVE commands, anyway? (Score:2)
10 cls
20 Print "First"
30 Print "Post"
40 goto 10
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I see. Let me provide some conditions then:
Unfortunately, even God can only fit an average of 5 commands onto a stone tablet, depending on compression techniques and the data to be recorded.
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WARNING: The above poster's life may contain inconsistency, hypocrisy, or white ninjas
... it snows a lot there?
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Actually, if you write really big, those stone tablets will last even *longer*. With stone it's a trade-off -- density of information vs. reading it 5,0000 years from now.
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I thought that all flash was already long lifed. (Score:2)
If you didn't use it.
Come on, I can put 2 GB of plain text on a USB key, and leave it with how to implement the USB standard on paper, put the things in a thick plastic bag, etc.
In the correct environment, it will last for a long long time.
(Of course, I haven't read the article.)
Re:I thought that all flash was already long lifed (Score:5, Insightful)
(Bonus exercise for the reader: Calculate the lifetime of these chips in libraries of congress written!)
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I can put 2 GB of plain text on a USB key, and leave it with how to implement the USB standard on paper, put the things in a thick plastic bag, etc.
In the correct environment, it will last for a long long time.
The paper will rot nicely due to its intrinsic acid content, the platic will out-gas and gum up everything near (and inside) it, then crumble into dust, the dielectric material in the key's capacitors will dry up and the resultant change in capacitance will render the circuit non-operative.
Give enou
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Acid free paper exists. And if you want, you could write on metal sheets (using a variety of languages), being in a water and air tight container (see below), we would expect them to not corrode.
But more to the point, if you take appropriate precautions, you can make things last a long time.
So, if plastic has problems (which I hadn't heard about), don't use it. Use something equally water and air tight that doesn't have those problems.
And I never said the thing would last forever.
Given enough time, heat dea
How long does today's flash memory last? (Score:2)
Anyone experts on this subject?
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I have an on-going experiment with a 2GB usb KEY. It's been happily over-written with random data non-stop for 38 days now (it takes 4 and a half minutes for one cycle), then read-checked. It's getting close to 12,000 cycles now and not one error bit detected so far.
If you believe this manufacturer's estimated MTBF, 100,000 cycles, I shouldn't see any errors before over 300 days.
Mind you, in a real-world application, you don't re-write your whole memory non-stop, so with wear-levelling I should expect Fla
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"Free space" on a USB-key is dependant on the file-system used, and the USB flash wear-levelling isn't aware of which blocks are used and which aren't because it can't possibly understand every file-system out there. Indeed, in my test I use the whole device as a raw device without a filesystem on it, that is to say I write to every block starting from 0 to the last one. There is no file-system, there is no "free space".
The key just provides a list of blocks. Internally, it maps those logical blocks numb
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Not an issue, unless he has a 2GB cache -- I doubt it. The system will realize the danger of data loss (based on preset algorithms) versus the relative age of the data, and LRU invalidate stuff to prevent it from becoming at-risk. With a 2GB working set, it's going to be 1:1.
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Improvements reading the data? (Score:2)
All well and good, but what about reading the data? Will we have the connectors and required document parsers in hundreds of years? Or will we be stuck with data on this amazingly long lasting device that we can't read?
Still, at least it seems to boost the number of writes as well, which is a bonus for general usage.
Read / write cycles (Score:5, Informative)
The summary does not specify exactly what is meant by "long-life". That refers to the current limitation of flash, where individual bits have a physical limitation to the number of times they can be modified. This "new" flash uses some sort of integrated "wear-leveling", so that all bits are utilized equally. Also, when individual bits (or more likely, groups of bits) are worn out they are retired. So instead of a failure, the capacity of the flash would decrease as write cycles exceed the physical limitations. Of course, if wear leveling was performed perfectly, then pretty much the entire array would fail at once, right?
The article doesn't address other important aspects, like read / write speed.
It does say that current flash memory is limited to 10k writes, which is low by at least a factor of 10. Modern flash should withstand at least 100k writes, and I've seen claims of over a million here and there.
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Of course, if wear leveling was performed perfectly, then pretty much the entire array would fail at once, right?
I have 4 wheels bearings on my Chrysler, and even though all of my wheels rotate with a perfect synchronism, only one of my bearings fails at a time, and the other ones don't follow ther brother in the next few miles...
Remember that at this scale, only an atom of difference could make some of those individual bits fail a year before the other...
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True, but if your car had 1 trillion bearings (100 GB at 8 bits per byte) then the probability is that most would fail at the same time.
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A bit of research from the original AIST site bring quite a lot of info.
The from the original tech report: [aist.go.jp]
Shigeki Sakai (Leader) et al. of the Novel Electron Devices Group, the Nanoelectronics Research Institute (Director: Seigo Kanemaru) of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) (President: Hiroyuki Yoshikawa) in collaboration with Ken Takeuchi, Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo (Univ. Tokyo) have demonstrated that the us
The key might last 100 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
... but will there be anything still able to read it in 2108? Even today finding something to read a laserdisk or some old style floppy disks is an issue and thats only 30 year old tech!
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The lack of moving parts makes it much easier to implement a reader for these things, rather than floppies, etc.
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Using electronic memory is far easier than say, a disc. With a disc, you need a lot of precision mechanical stuff in addition to electronics. With a semiconductor, you don't need all the mechanical stuff. It would take me about 45 minutes to make a circuit on breadboard to read a ROM that was made in 1975 onto a modern MacBook Pro. To homebrew a laser disc player would probably be two years work.
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It all depends on how successful the format is. It's trivial to read a CD, and that is twenty-five year old tech.
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"I expect in another 100 years we'll have direct-from-brain transfer of information to and from our implanted minicomputers"
Meh , that crops up all the time in sci-fi and futuroligist stuff. I'm not convinced. The technology may become available but I doubt many people apart from a few techno fetischists and body piercing types would really want a machine plugged into their body full time, much less their brains.
Re:The key might last 100 years... (Score:4, Funny)
You clearly haven't heard of the iPod, it seems.
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Heh , pity I don't have mod points, that made me smile :) Its so true.
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I would have doubted that many people want to talk into a little plastic box all day, or shove magnets into their ears and shut themselves off from the world, or get electronic messages from work in their pocket twenty four hours a day, but here we are.
Umm .. MRAM anybody? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fairchild has been making MRAM for awhile now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAM [wikipedia.org]
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-55C to -125C - really? I can't see that being very useful. Except for a trip to Neptune.
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Pity it's so expensive - from my usual electronics supplier it's over an order of magnitude more expensive than NOR flash of the same size.
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Full circle (Score:2)
For the home market
Solid State Cartridge
Tape
Magnetic Disc
Optical Disc
So what are we back to?
Solid State Cartridge
So so long as they make 5 inch jewel cases to store them.
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I really hope game cartridges come back. Discs just don't do it for me the way popping a cartridge into a console does.
This is not flash ram (Score:3, Informative)
Novel Ferroelectric NAND Flash Memory Cell Demonstrates 10000 Times More Program and Erase cycles than Conventional Memory Cells [aist.go.jp] (AIST press release, surprisingly science-dense).
Highly Scalable Fe(Ferroelectric)-NAND Cell [ieee.org] - contribution to the Non-Volatile Semiconductor Memory Workshop, 2008 (you may have access to only the abstract).
This is NOT flash ram, it's ferroelectric RAM [wikipedia.org]. This doesn't matter much to the consumer who can use it much the same way, but it's a different principle. Apparently they've (semi-)tested 100 million r/w cycles, and expect that it can hold data for 10 years (extrapolated from some curve). Besides, it uses a lower voltage than flash, and they expect it to scale down further. Nice. It even looks like it might work. SSDs for teh win
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Ferroelectric is named after ferromagnetic, because it's the same, only with electric polarization: If you put a ferroelectric in a strong electric field it will become positively charged on one end, and negatively on
Teenage mutant ninja scientists? (Score:2)
Anyone else thought they've mutated by experimenting on themselves? I have to stop seeing anime...