Moreover, although IBM has withdrawn from the memory chip business, the company said it was intensely interested in the technology for corporate computing applications like transaction processing. Faster nonvolatile memory could change the design of the microprocessors that IBM makes, speeding up a variety of basic operations.
The new memory technology could potentially be added to a future generation of the IBM Power PC microprocessor, according to Spike Narayan, a senior manager at the company s Almaden Research Center here.
Over two and a half yeas, in a trial-and-error process, scientists here explored a class of materials that can be switched from an amorphous state to a crystalline one and then back again by repeated heating. The compounds, known as GST, or germanium-antimony-tellurium phase change materials, are routinely used today to make inexpensive optical disks that are read from and written to with laser beams.
The IBM led team has proved that the same effect can be realized by using a small electrical current. That has made it possible to build tiny memory cells that can store digital 1 s and 0 s by means of electricity rather than light. IBM scientists say the new material is an alloy composed of just germanium and antimony, and is referred to as GS. The scientists do not describe the material in detail in the paper.
The advantage of the new material, according to the scientists, is that it can be used to create switches more than 500 times as fast as today s flash chips. Moreover, the prototype switch developed by the scientists is just 3 nanometers high by 20 nanometers wide, offering the promise that the technology can be shrunk to smaller dimensions than could be attained by flash manufacturers.
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