Where Storage Goes Next

Where Storage Goes Next

Lee Gomes, 12.08.08, 12:00 AM EST

The limits of physics demand that gadget masters make a great leap forward in storing data.

Microprocessors get most of the attention that comes to semiconductors because of the godlike feats of math and logic they perform. But humble memory and storage devices have driven most of the advances in consumer electronics the last few years.

Each successive iPhone or iPod Shuffle is cooler than the last because of the continuing decline in flash memory prices. Key-chain USB flash drives can now hold a complete DVD movie, and can be made so cheaply that they're given away as trade show souvenirs. A 1-terabyte magnetic disk drive the size of a paperback book that costs $100 will hold a lifetime of videos from even the most tireless household documentary maker.

The combined global industries of disk storage and semiconductor memory are worth $90 billion a year. But in memory, especially, it's an era of profitless prosperity. So many manufacturing plants have been added by Korean, Japanese and U.S. firms in the last several years that the market is glutted with chips, leading to low prices for consumers and no profits for manufacturers.

Another crisis is looming for memory makers, this one involving physics. Chips have gotten so dense, so crammed with data, that they've come close to the end of the road in terms of what atoms can do for you.

The very first commercial memory devices, called core memories, were made in the 1950s and required several intersecting wires, along with a ceramic ring that could slip over a sewing needle, to hold a single bit of a data. Today the silicon chips used in the most critical applications, like the high-speed random access memory in a desktop computer, have become so dense that the storing of a bit is entrusted to a mere 100 electrons. That takes even the most precise manufacturing to the point where one cannot be sure a zero or one has been stored properly. The improvements in memory that gadget hounds have come to take for granted are endangered.

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In response, memory makers like Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) and Samsung are beginning work on entirely new kinds of technologies. One of the most promising is called phase change memory, which beams tiny, precisely timed pulses of heat at a glasslike substance. Heat keeps the atoms aswim in a chaotic fashion that resists electric current. Shut the heat off and they cool into a tight crystal lattice that's highly conductive. Data are read off the chip by measuring whether the cell conducts electricity or not. Numonyx, a venture started by Intel and STMicroelectronics, recently found that two additional phases can be read, which could lead to squeezing even more information into the same space. Edward Doller, Numonyx's chief technical officer, says the overall promise of phase change is to continue memory's practice of doubling in capacity every 12 months or so for years to come.

Because phase change memory is both fast and nonvolatile, meaning it keeps its information even without power, it has the potential to become the "universal memory" the industry is seeking. Imagine a computer that combined the high and nonvolatile capacity of a magnetic hard drive with the speed of RAM into a bank of new chips. You can turn it off at night and flip it on in the morning in exactly the state you left it in the night before. (Flash memory is based on a different technology and is too slow to be used as RAM inside PCs.)