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Flash RAM replacement promises high speeds

If you think Flash RAM is too slow and not durable enough, Samsung would like …

Since its introduction, Flash RAM has become immensely popular. It is widely used in digital music players, millions of people have USB thumbdrives on their persons, and hybrid hard drives that combine flash memory with the spinning platters are on their way. For all its usefulness, flash RAM does have its drawbacks: it's relatively slow and it has a finite (although high) number of read-write-erase cycles.

Enter PRAM. Despite sharing the same name, the new memory technology from Samsung is not to be confused with the stuff Mac owners zap when troubleshooting a balky machine. Phase-change Random Access Memory is Samsung's new memory technology that works much like flash memory, but is much faster and more durable.

So far, Samsung has built a fully-functional 512Mb chip to demonstrate the technology. It uses the same vertical diodes and three-dimensional transistor structure used in DRAM and unlike flash RAM, can write data without needing to erase data already present on the drive. Samsung says that overcoming this limitation means that PRAM can operate at speeds up to 30 times faster than flash RAM. It will also last longer—up to 10 times longer than flash RAM chips.

The chipmaker anticipates offering a full lineup of PRAM products in 2008, once it has the kinks in the manufacturing process worked out and fabrication facilities up to speed. It looks promising from a fabrication point of view, though. Samsung says that it will be less expensive to manufacture since it requires 20 percent fewer process steps than does conventional flash.

It is possible that laptops and other computers will incorporate PRAM into their systems down the road, as the battery life on a laptop with a large PRAM drive could be rather impressive. In the near-term, PRAM is more likely to be used for applications such as cell phones that use a relatively small amount of memory, but where faster reads and writes could result in a significant increase in performance.

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