Digital Home Thoughts: Alloy Holds Promise of Speedier Memory Chip

"Scientists at IBM and two partner companies have developed a promising material that they believe will lead to a new kind of memory chip able to meet the growing appetite for storing digital music, pictures and video. The advance will be described in a technical paper to be presented Monday at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco by researchers from IBM and two computer memory manufacturers, Qimonda and Macronix. The scientists have designed a new semiconductor alloy derived from materials currently used in optical storage devices like CDs and DVDs. This team is not the only entrant in the race to find alternatives to flash memory, the prevailing form of nonvolatile storage--so called because it can retain information without power. Intel and STMicroelectronics have formed a partnership to pursue the technology, and, separately, Samsung has made announcements in the field."

I find the following statement in the news story most drool-worthy - The advantage of the new material, according to the scientists, is that it can be used to create switches over 500 times faster than today's flash chips. Currently manufacturers are still playing with < 100MB chips and they too woudl be available by 2008 by the very earliest. However, I am guessing that greater capacities will be available soon enough.