Machines Like Us

A new nanowire-based memory device being developed by researchers at IBM could combine the best qualities of the various types of memory used today, driving down costs and improving performance. If the experimental memory pans out -- and the work is still in the very early stages of development -- it could serve as a universal memory, substituting for the different types now used.

Stuart Parkin, an experimental physicist at IBM's Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, CA, says that the memory, which would pack a hundred bits of data on a single nanowire, could potentially store 10 to 100 times more data than flash -- the type of memory used in digital cameras and other small portable devices--while operating at much faster speeds. And because it's solid-state memory, it would be far sturdier than magnetic hard drives, which require mechanical devices to read and write data. "In principle, we could be cheaper than flash would be, denser than flash would be, and orders of magnitude faster," Parkin says. "And there's no wear-out mechanism, so it's totally reliable."

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