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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."
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.
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.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Unfortunately, even God can only fit 5 commands on a single stone tablet.
which is totally what she said
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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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.
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.
(Bonus exercise for the reader: Calculate the lifetime of these chips in libraries of congress written!)
The guy (or gal) was etching those stones using a friggin' lightning bolt from his cloud in the sky... that's pretty damned impressive.
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.
Better known as 318230.
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...
10nm get you anyting you want baby, me so info-dense, baby, me so info-dense. Me store you long time.
+5, Truth