The '50-50' Chip: Memory Device of the Future? Material Built from Aluminum and Antimony Shows Promi - Polidicks

[url]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130913113340.htm[/url] [IMG]http://images.sciencedaily.com/2013/09/130913113340.jpg[/IMG] [QUOTE][B]A new, environmentally-friendly electronic alloy consisting of 50 aluminum atoms bound to 50 atoms of antimony may be promising for building next-generation "phase-change" memory devices, which may be the data-storage technology of the future, according to a new paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, which is produced by AIP Publishing.[/B] Phase-change memory is being actively pursued as an alternative to the ubiquitous flash memory for data storage applications, because flash memory is limited in its storage density and phase-change memory can operate much faster. Phase-change memory relies on materials that change from a disordered, amorphous structure to a crystalline structure when an electrical pulse is applied. The material has high electrical resistance in its amorphous state and low resistance in its crystalline state -- corresponding to the 1 and 0 states of binary data. Flash memory has problems when devices get smaller than 20 nanometers. But a phase-change memory device can be less than 10 nanometers -- allowing more memory to be squeezed into tinier spaces. "That's the most important feature of this kind of memory," said Xilin Zhou of the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Data can also be written into phase-change memories very quickly and the devices would be relatively inexpensive, he added. So far, the most popular material for phase-change memory devices contains germanium, antimony, and tellurium. But compounds with three elements are more difficult to work with, Zhou said. "It's difficult to control the phase-change memory manufacturing process of ternary alloys such as the traditionally used germanium-antimony-tellurium material. Etching and polishing of the material with chalcogens can change the material's composition, due to the motion of the tellurium atoms," explained Zhou. Zhou and his colleagues turned to a material with just two elements: aluminum and antimony. They studied the material's phase-changing properties, finding that it's more thermally stable than the Ge-Sb-Te compound. The researchers discovered that Al50Sb50, in particular, has three distinct levels of resistance -- and thus the ability to store three bits of data in a single memory cell, instead of just two. This suggests that this material can be used for multilevel data storage. "A two-step resistance drop during the crystallization of the material can be used for multilevel data storage (MLS) and, interestingly, three distinct resistance levels are achieved in the phase-change memory cells," Zhou says. "So the aluminum-antimony material looks promising for use in high-density nonvolatile memory applications because of its good thermal stability and MLS capacity."[/QUOTE]

I honestly don't understand most of what is said here, but would this tech more reliable than flash memory, in terms of SSD's tier hard-drives?

[QUOTE=whatthe;42214236]I honestly don't understand most of what is said here, but would this tech more reliable than flash memory, in terms of SSD's tier hard-drives?[/QUOTE] Instead of taking a minimum of 20 square nano meters they take ten, or four times capacity if I'm understanding this right.

[QUOTE=Reshy;42214323]Instead of taking a minimum of 20 square nano meters they take ten, or four times capacity if I'm understanding this right.[/QUOTE] Yeh I understood that, I meant in terms of life-span and reliability.

[QUOTE=whatthe;42214485]Yeh I understood that, I meant in terms of life-span and reliability.[/QUOTE] PRAM has a longer life than flash memory, from wikipedia an estimate is 100 million write cycles compared to about 100 thousand for flash, of course this is still pretty early work so can't say for sure.

[QUOTE]The researchers discovered that Al50Sb50, in particular, has three distinct levels of resistance -- and thus the ability to store [B]three bits of data[/B] in a single memory cell, instead of just two. This suggests that this material can be used for multilevel data storage.[/QUOTE] Ternary computers! Yeah!

Basically from what I see is that it lasts up to 1000 times longer and can fit 6 times more data into the same space as a standard flash memory cell. (Quarter the size with 50% more data storage)

How difficult/expensive would it be to manufacture?

[QUOTE=Psychokitten;42215125]How difficult/expensive would it be to manufacture?[/QUOTE] Well like with all electronics, it'll start out super expensive and eventually it'll get considerably cheaper.

[QUOTE=Psychokitten;42215125]How difficult/expensive would it be to manufacture?[/QUOTE] About the same, assuming the thing is temperature stable.

[QUOTE=Psychokitten;42215125]How difficult/expensive would it be to manufacture?[/QUOTE] Considering they're abandoning Germanium and Tellurium in favor of Aluminum makes a lot of difference. Tellurium is as rare as Platinum and Germanium which is hard to work with. The lack of those two elements should drastically reduce cost.

[QUOTE=Reshy;42215249]Considering they're abandoning Germanium and Tellurium in favor of Aluminum makes a lot of difference. Tellurium is as rare as Platinum and Germanium which is hard to work with. The lack of those two elements should drastically reduce cost.[/QUOTE] Cool. Would this also reduce the size of electronics?

[QUOTE=Psychokitten;42215364]Cool. Would this also reduce the size of electronics?[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]Flash memory has problems when devices get smaller than 20 nanometers. But a phase-change memory device can be less than 10 nanometers -- allowing more memory to be squeezed into tinier spaces.[/QUOTE]

And they can have up to 4 states, I.E 4 bits per memory cell.