Japanese Scientists Develop Long-Life Flash Memory

schliz writes "Flash memory chips with a potential lifetime of hundreds of years have been developed by Japanese scientists. The new chips also work at lower voltages than conventional chips, according to the scientists from the University of Tokyo. They are said to be scaleable down to at least 10 nm; current Flash chips wouldn't be usable below 20 nm."

Comments

Read / write cycles

[Dan East]

The summary does not specify exactly what is meant by "long-life". That refers to the current limitation of flash, where individual bits have a physical limitation to the number of times they can be modified. This "new" flash uses some sort of integrated "wear-leveling", so that all bits are utilized equally. Also, when individual bits (or more likely, groups of bits) are worn out they are retired. So instead of a failure, the capacity of the flash would decrease as write cycles exceed the physical limitations. Of course, if wear leveling was performed perfectly, then pretty much the entire array would fail at once, right?

The article doesn't address other important aspects, like read / write speed.

It does say that current flash memory is limited to 10k writes, which is low by at least a factor of 10. Modern flash should withstand at least 100k writes, and I've seen claims of over a million here and there.