IBM Memory Making Breakthrough 100x Faster

NAND Flash memory or Flash is now widely used as a storage device - such as SSDs (solid state drive) - will soon be rivaled by the Phase Change Memory (PCM).

The reason, IBM has recently announced that it has made a breakthrough in PCM so that its performance is 100 times of NAND Flash.

High performance due to the PCM is no longer any write-erase cycles. In NAND flash cycle is needed is the data marked for deletion before new data is written. Erase-write cycles are degrading the performance of NAND flash.

Another advantage of PCM is a longer service life than NAND flash. NAND flash has only the writing cycle from 5,000 to 10,000 times for consumer products. Once the cycle is reached, the NAND flash can not be used anymore.

For enterprise-class products NAND flash write cycle can be up to 100,000 times. According to IBM, the PCM can achieve a cycle of writing 5 million times so it is suitable for enterprise-class applications.

For products such as mobile phones and MP3 players, age memory writing cycle is memadahi 3000. Age is already beyond the age of the memory devices that use it. But for enterprise applications such as in cloud computing services, according to IBM, one hour has happened thousands of times the writing cycle.

Higher capacity also be another advantage of PCM. According to IBM, they have been able to produce PCM chips that each cell can store two or even three bits of data. This is called multi-level cell (MLC). The technology is there now for the new PCM single-level cell (SLC) which stores one bit of data per cell.

Various advantages of PCM's because the properties are owned by the materials used. Materials for the PCM is already used in rewriteable optical discs such as DVDs. This material will experience a change in electrical resistance when the phase change from amorphous to poly-crystalline phase.

The properties of these materials allows a better memory created in the data store with a size that can be further reduced and also the electrical power requirements are smaller.