World's Thinnest Flash Memory Cell Unveiled

qorkfiend writes "Measuring a scant 20 nanometers across, Infineon AG's new nonvolatile flash memory cell could lead to 32 gigabit flash chips within the next few years. The cell contains a unique structure with a fin for the transistor to avoid nano-scale physical effects and uses 90% less electrons than today's memory to store data."

Comments

replacement?

[phoric]

How about replacing a hard drive with flash chips for ultra-compact PCs? I know a lot of devices use this and some people boot linux off usb flash keys, but what about a built-in flash HD interface?

Re:replacement?

[m50d]

IIRC it's fine as long as you use a filesystem designed to deal with it, and don't use it for swap, logs etc. For storing your home stuff in it's fine, just have no swap and put /tmp and maybe /var on tmpfs.

Re:does this mean

[morcheeba]

The article said 90% less electrons, and true, electrons (or holes) make up current, but that's not what they meant. They said it was 90% less electrons stored in each cell -- This is just a small portion of the total current used in the memory.

An ampere of current is 6.24 * 10^18 electrons/second, so to write at 12 megabits/second (USB speed) would require only 1 billion electrons/second, or 0.173 nanoamps -- the rest of the chip will probably take milliamps and dwarf the actual number of electrons flowing into the cells.

Most of the current is used to combat the capacitance on the bit lines - since the X & Y grid wires are so close to other wires (protected by an insulator, of course), a natural capacitor forms. If you want to change the voltage on these bit lines quickly, the capacitance will demand current. You'll get the current back when you eventually try to remove the voltage, but so far it isn't really worth it to recover this current because, after resistive losses, it's at a slightly less voltage. (there are some cool schemes to pump that current into the next bitline to be accessed, but this happens more with synchronized clocks).

Power is also dissipated by the analog sense amplifiers at the edges of the FLASH memory that convert low-level voltages to more usable digital signals.

Power dissipation is more of a problem for processors & not FLASH memory. FLASH is all about density and cost.