IBM announces a major memory breakthrough

COMPUTER INDUSTRY GIANT IBM has announced a major breakthrough in memory technology that can reliably store multiple data bits per cell over a long period of time.

The technology, called phase-change memory, will lead to faster and more durable memory applications at lower cost, according to boffins at IBM. These could be used in smartphones, cloud datacentre storage and in enterprise data storage, among other areas.

The memory will rank as the best in class for retention and scaling and close to the best in speed and endurance. Density will be marked as good, but won't be quite as good as flash memory.

A multi-level variant of phase-change memory will bump up the density to best in class, but speed takes a hit, no longer ranking as the best. It appears to be a choice between speed and density, just as flash has good density but bad speeds and DRAM has good speeds but only adequate density.

IBM claims that phase-change memory can write and retrieve data 100 times faster than flash memory and can endure 10 million write cycles, compared to a maximum of 30,000 cycles in enterprise-class flash. This makes it a viable contendor in both the consumer and enterprise fields.

Boffins at IBM made the breakthrough by using advanced modulation coding techniques to help offset the problem of short-term drift in multi-bit phase-change memory, which can result in read errors. This lack of reliability in multi-bit phase-change memory was the main obstacle to its use, but now that IBM has solved this problem the technology can be be pushed into the memory market.

IBM expects the technology to feature in a limited number of smartphones in the short term and will have widespread application by 2016, when multi-level phase-change memory will appear. µ