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Japanese Scientists Develop Long-Life Flash Memory

Posted by kdawson on from the degrades-gracefully-too dept.

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."

6 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. What is the point? by damburger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Given that we tend to dump flash memory whenever a larger and more compact one comes along, and transfer our data, what use is there for a flash chip that will keep data for 100 years but be obsolete in 2?

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    1. Re:What is the point? by jacquesm · · Score: 4, Interesting

      it's to facilitate the new profession of 'data archaeologist'. People that will be sifting through the digital detritus of the pre-AI era two hundred years from now.

      Looking for the rosetta's stone that will enable them to translate 'flash' into 'realmedia' ;)

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    2. Re:What is the point? by MyLongNickName · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I would hardly call 100 years archival. In some exceptional cases its within the memory span of a single human individual.

      Ummmm. Yea. I am going to have granny memorize my last ten years of photos, movies and financial records.

      Fact is, I have struggled with a good method for backing up all of this. I've basically settled on mirroring with a remote FTP site. It works, but with my horrible upload speed, initial synchronization took 48 hours plus. Quarterly updates take a couple hours. And the other pain in the butt is I have to encrypt my financial info as I don't trust it being in the hands of a third party.

      Now if I had a medium that were 99% successful at retaining info for 20 years, I would backup to two manufacturer's media, and stick it in my safety deposit box.

      I don't have that degree of confidence in any low cost storage media yet.

      So for archival, yes, this is a wonderful advance.

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    3. Re:What is the point? by jimicus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Archival. Once it's archived you can forget about it. For example, your local library doesn't convert all that old microfilm just because it can. It would only do it to put it onto a more stable storage medium.

      At least until the technology changes so much that you can no longer buy anything that will read it, cf. the BBC's Doomsday project:

      http://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?newsid=937

    4. Re:What is the point? by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm assuming you are under 30 and haven't lost a grandparent. Now that I have lost a few family members, I wish I had more photos, more memories to look through. Perhaps it is a case of you don't miss something till it is gone.

      I will pull up the digital photo album of old vacations, and my kids love to remember what we did. At some point, my kids will become uninterested as I did when I was younger. But as some point, I know they will enjoy revisiting them.

      I sure as hell don't want that to not be possible because my hard drive crashed.

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  2. Umm .. MRAM anybody? by djtachyon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just received some samples of military grade MRAM recently. 4MB, "infinite" writes, "infinite" lifetime, -55C - 125C operating range, lower power than DRAM, and 35ns cycle times.

    Fairchild has been making MRAM for awhile now.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAM

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