18 Dec 2010
Samsung has begun producing a new type of “melting” memory chip that could replace flash memory and boost battery life in mobile phones by more than 20 percent.
The world’s largest maker of memory chips, Samsung said that it is now manufacturing phase-change random access memory, or PRAM, in 512-megabit capacities.
Phase change memory chips have been discussed for decades. In them, a chemical compound called chalcogenide — which is also used in CD-RW rewritable disks — is heated to very high temperatures. The heat changes the physical state of the compound, and the two resulting states become the binary “ones and zeros” used by computers for data storage. |