San Francisco — A breakthrough in the development of a new type
of random access memory called Phase Change Memory (PCM) was
revealed here at the International Electronic Devices Meeting.
PCM is under co-development by IBM, Infineon and Macronix.
Unlike SRAM or DRAM, PCM is non-volatile so it retains the
information even when there is no electricity. In addition, PCM
data switching speed is in excess of 500 times faster then
regular RAM and it uses half as much energy. Another result will
be computers and handheld devices that can instantaneously turn
on. The magic behind PCM comes from how it changes its component
material, a new alloy, from an amorphous to a crystalline
structure to hold information, IBM said. Conventional RAM uses
an electrical charge to record the data’s 1s and 0s on its
silica, with a 1 having a charge and a 0 not. While the
breakthrough was announced, no roadmap of when PCM would become
commercially available was released. The research work will be
conducted at IBM's TJ Watson Research