An innovative new memory technology that promises to replace flash in a wide range of products has been unveiled by IBM and two partners who claim their phase-change technology is 500 times faster than flash and draws roughly half the power.
The principal advantage of this phase-change technology is that, like flash, it is nonvolatile, meaning information can be stored when the power is turned off. But memory built with the phase-change technology, according to Big Blue, also can read and write data at the same speed as existing RAM.
Researchers at IBM, Macronix, and Qimonda contend that the technology, which can be scaled to dimensions smaller than flash, might eventually become the universal memory format for mobile devices, such as laptops and mobile phones.