Scientists in Japan have developed a new kind of flash memory that could potentially last hundreds of years. The new ferroelectric Nand Flash chip can also be made smaller and uses less power than current chips.
Flash chips are everywhere these days, providing storage on USB thumb drives, mini notebooks like the Eee PC, gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii, digital cameras as well as SSD hard disk drives and countless other devices.
These chips offer us a large amount of storage in a slim, lightweight design, but not many people realize that they are expected to have a lifetime of only 10 years.
These new chips can be written to over 100 million times versus just 10,000 times with today’s chips. They also use less than 6 volts when writing, compared with 20 volts currently.
Maybe we should put off getting that new thumb drive for a bit, eh?
Sources:
Vnunet
The Inquirer
Photo credit:
Ambuj Saxena from Flickr