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

What is the point?

[damburger]

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?

Re:What is the point?

[dintech]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[jacquesm]

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' ;)

Re:What is the point?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[Firefalcon]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[MyLongNickName]

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.

if you write real small

[jacquesm]

Stone tablets will last even longer!

Re:if you write real small

[somersault]

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

Re:if you write real small

[jacquesm]

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

Re:if you write real small

[Chrisq]

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.

Re:if you write real small

[Thanshin]

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...

Re:I thought that all flash was already long lifed

[ZombieWomble]

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!)

Or...

[DrYak]

god, indeed, does not exist.

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

Re:Or...

[Wite_Noiz]

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.

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.

Umm .. MRAM anybody?

[djtachyon]

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

Re:Awesome

[utopianfiat]

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