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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."

21 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 dintech · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. 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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    3. Re:What is the point? by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The calendar time isn't important, it's just a headline. The real news is the number of write cycles going from ~10,100 to ~100,000,000 cycles, thereby making it usable in things like swap memory. By marking bad cells, much like bad sectors on hard disks, you also don't have to discard the whole chip if a single cell fails - like you do if a single cell fails in a RAM chip.

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    4. Re:What is the point? by Firefalcon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's still better than the lifetime of most other electronic storage media. Obviously conservation efforts (i.e. duplication) would have to be made (at it's half life of 50 years I'd guess), but the same applies to film, paper, etc.

      The advantage of digital media though is that multiple identical copies can be made, without any loss that can occur when duplicating analogue materials, and the cost of multiple digital copies over an extended period is almost certainly going to be considerably less than the cost of performing restoration and preservation on, for instance, a several hundred year old manuscript.

    5. 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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    6. 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

    7. 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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    8. Re:What is the point? by jacquesm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The move where storage is going 'online' will mitigate this to some extent, at the same time it will create a larger problem is something goes wrong with all that online storage.

      Storage reminds me of the situation around energy generation. If you all generate your own energy and consume it on the spot then there will be lots of outages, but small ones. If you do it centralized then you get less outages, but *MUCH* larger ones.

      I fully expect something similar to happen to online storage, it will seem to be more reliable because on average it will be better than storing your data locally, but when it goes it will go bigtime.

      That's when the data recovery guys will have a field day.

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  2. if you write real small by jacquesm · · Score: 4, Funny

    Stone tablets will last even longer!

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    1. Re:if you write real small by somersault · · Score: 5, Funny

      Unfortunately, even God can only fit 5 commands on a single stone tablet.

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      which is totally what she said
    2. Re:if you write real small by jacquesm · · Score: 5, Funny

      the fact that any three year old can do better is probably one of the stronger proofs that god, indeed, does not exist.

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    3. Re:if you write real small by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Funny

      Unfortunately, even God can only fit 5 commands on a single stone tablet.

      Its just as well. Imagine what Sunday School would have been like if Moses hat taken a PDA up mount Sinai and come back with the 65,536 commandments.

    4. Re:if you write real small by Thanshin · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's not just like 'thou shalt not kill', each command is quite verbose.

      Thou, hereby referred to as THE SINNER, shall not, under any circumstance, unless with the express permission of thy god, hereby referred as GOD, attempt to willfully, negligently or otherwise end the life of another...

  3. Re:I thought that all flash was already long lifed by ZombieWomble · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is one of those wonderful headlines where they convert the big scary numbers into a nice friendly unit and completely miss the point. What's interesting about this memory is not that it could be locked away and would be stable, but that it's much more stable under repeated use (100 million writes as opposed to tens of thousands). So they've presumably taken some arbitrary number of "writes per year" and divided to get their 100 year figure.

    (Bonus exercise for the reader: Calculate the lifetime of these chips in libraries of congress written!)

  4. Or... by DrYak · · Score: 4, Funny

    god, indeed, does not exist.

    ...Or is even less skilled than a toddler.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:Or... by Wite_Noiz · · Score: 5, Funny
      Blimey, you guys are cynical.

      The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky... that's pretty damned impressive.

  5. Read / write cycles by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  6. 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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  7. Re:The key might last 100 years... by Amorymeltzer · · Score: 3, Funny

    You clearly haven't heard of the iPod, it seems.

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  8. Re:Awesome by utopianfiat · · Score: 5, Funny

    10nm get you anyting you want baby, me so info-dense, baby, me so info-dense. Me store you long time.

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