Flash memory is widely used in USB and solid-state drives
A brief jolt of 800C heat can stop flash memory wearing out, researchers in Taiwan have found.
Flash memory is widely used in computers and electronic
gadgets because it is fast and remembers data written to it even when
unpowered.
However, flash memory reliability suffers significantly after about 10,000 write and read cycles.
Using heat, the researchers have found a way to "heal" flash memory materials to make them last 100 million cycles.
Hot chip
Heat has long been known to help heal degraded materials in
old flash memory. But because the heat healing process meant baking the
memory chip in an oven at 250C for hours, few saw it as a practical
solution.
Researchers at electronics company Macronix have found a way
around this by re-designing chips to put a heater alongside the memory
material that holds the data.
In a paper due to be presented at the International Electron
Devices Meeting 2012, the Macronix researchers said their onboard heater
applied a jolt of heat to small groups of memory cells. Briefly heating
those locations to about 800C returned damaged memory locations to full
working order.
The re-designed memory chip was safe, they said, because very
small areas were being heated for only a few milliseconds. The process
also consumed small amounts of power so should not significantly reduce
battery life on portable gadgets, they said.
Tests carried out by Macronix on the novel memory chips shows
that they can last at least 100 million write and read cycles. The true
upper limit of their reliability has not been plumbed, the researchers told IEEE Spectrum,
because it takes weeks to write and read data tens of millions of
times, even to fast memory chips. Testing for billions of cycles would
take "months", said the researchers.
Macronix said it planned to capitalise on its research but
gave no date for when the improved flash memory might start appearing in
gadgets.
0 comments