Two eternal flash technologies

    The main problem of modern flash drives and SSDs based on them is the too short lifespan of microchips. Despite all the tricks, now one cell can withstand only about 10,000 write-erase cycles. Due to the fragility of the microcircuits, it is impossible to reduce the cell size and make a more capacious memory, because when transistors with a manufacturing process of less than 20 nm are manufactured, the flash memory life will be reduced to critical values ​​in general.

    It is in this direction that the best minds are now working in the R&D centers of the largest companies from the microelectronics industry. This week it became known immediately about two interesting developments.

    Engineers from Numonix , a subsidiary of Intel, have proposedto cover the cells, the same materials that are used in the production of compact discs, that is, a layered structure of tellurium, germanium and antimony. Theoretically, such a Phase Change Memory (PCM) structure can reduce cell sizes as much as 5 nm. At the same time, an extremely high lifespan will remain (up to 1 million write-erase cycles), as well as in the 128 MB test module they have already created. This is a hundred times more than with existing technology.

    Japanese scientists have come up with an alternative way . They propose introducing into the existing flash memory something like a “hot swap” mechanism, when the failure of individual cells does not affect the operation of the entire module. According to the calculations of the Japanese, the lifespan of the “ferroelectric” NAND module is increased to 100 million cycles, and the manufacturing process can be reduced to 10 nm.

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