Memory

Heat flow in atomically thin materials is strongly directional and now research from A*STAR indicates that this property could be employed to improve the performance of computer hard drives. Hard drives store data by using magnetic fields to change the properties of a small section of a magnetically sensitive material. Decreasing the size of this section increases the drive's capacity but also increases the size of the magnetic field required for...

Toshiba Electronics Europe has announced the immediate availability of PCI Express and DDR3 SDRAM IP subsystems developed in conjunction with Northwest Logic, a leading provider of high-performance, easy-to-use, silicon-proven PCI Express and Memory Interface IP cores. These subsystems are available on custom LSI platforms, including ASIC and FFSA.

Expanding its line of legacy low-power CMOS SRAMs, Alliance Memory has announced an 8M IC (512k x 16-bit) in the 48-pin 12x20mm TSOP-I package. Available from a very limited number of suppliers and recently discontinued by another manufacturer, the AS6C8016-55TIN operates from a single power supply of 2.7 to 3.6V and offers a fast access time of 55ns.

Computers are often described with "ones and zeros," referring to their binary nature: each memory element stores data in two states. But there is no fundamental reason why there should be just two. In a study, researchers have designed a magnetic element that has six stable magnetic states, which paves the way toward realising a six-state magnetic memory element.

For the first time, scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated reliably storing 3 bits of data per cell using a relatively memory technology known as phase-change memory (PCM). The current memory landscape spans from venerable DRAM to hard disk drives to ubiquitous flash. But in the last several years PCM has attracted the industry's attention as a potential universal memory technology based on its combination of read/write speed, enduranc...

The new industrial-grade SuperMLC UHS-I Speed Class 1 (U1) microSD cards from Transcend have capacities of 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB. Between SLC and MLC NAND flash, the new SuperMLC technology features a cost-effective solution yet with nearly equivalent performance to SLC NAND flash. The SuperMLC is ideal for industrial applications and is available at distributor Rutronik.

Scientists from MIPT have succeeded in growing ultra-thin (2.5-nanometre) ferroelectric films based on hafnium oxide that could potentially be used to develop non-volatile memory elements called ferroelectric tunnel junctions. The results of the study have been published in the journal ACS Applied Material Interfaces. Scientists all over the world are trying to develop faster and more compact storage devices. The ideal would be a universal memory...

IDT announced that its 4RCD0124K register, 4DB0226KA3 data buffer and TSE2004 temperature sensor components are fully qualified by memory eco-system leaders,  including Intel, Dell and Micron, for DIMM applications on Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family-based server and storage systems.

A technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a supermarket down to the size of an ice cube. The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival te...

From changing the phase of glass to moving copper ions around, Sally Ward-Foxton reports on some of the most novel and interesting memory technologies to come to market in recent months.