Sunday, December 2, 2012

Flash memory limits defeated, with heat

Flash memory is great. Its stable, its fast but it has some short comings, one of the biggest being relatively short read-write cycles that lead to flash memory wearing out. But Taiwanese firm Macronix have found a way to drastically increase its lifespan, potentially into the 100 million cycles range. The secret, blasting the modules with extreme heat at very specific times.
phys.org reports:


"News of their findings appears in the IEEE Spectrum, discussing flash memory's limitations and the Taiwan company's solution. Macronix is a manufacturer in the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) market, with a NOR Flash, NAND Flash, and ROM products. Before their solution announcement, though, many engineers inside and outside of Macronix were aware of a life-giving workaround: heat. The snag is that applying heat was not found to be practical. As the Macronix team put it, the "long baking time is impractical for real time operation." Although subjecting the cells to high heat could return memory, the process was problematic; the entire memory chip would need heating for hours at around 250 °C.
"

great news, can`t wait for these flash memory modules to hit the consumer market, can`t come soon enough

more here

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