The development of models of the brain rests on the lack of a suitable memory: fast, dense and non-volatile at the same time. For computers and smartphones, too, there is not enough memory with similar properties. The discovery of British physicists promises to bring the emergence of the necessary universal memory.
Invention physicists from Lancaster University (UK). Back in June last year in the journal Nature, they , in which they talked about solving the paradox of universal memory, which should combine the incompatible: the speed of DRAM and the non-volatility of NAND.
The June paper detailed a memory cell that exploits the quantum properties of an electron. Due to the wave nature of this particle, it can through the forbidden barrier. To do this, the electron must have a certain amount of "resonant" energy. When a small potential of up to 2,6 V is applied to the cell developed by scientists, electrons begin to tunnel through a three-layer barrier made of materials of indium arsenide and aluminum antimonide (InAs / AlSb). Under normal conditions, this barrier prevents the passage of electrons and keeps them in the cell without power supply, which allows you to save the value written to the cell for a long time.
In the latest January issue of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, the same researchers that they were able to create reliable schemes for reading data from such cells and learned how to combine cells into memory arrays. Along the way, physicists have found that the "sharpness of the transition barriers" creates the preconditions for creating very dense arrays of cells. Also during the modeling process for the 20-nm process technology, it became clear that the energy efficiency of the proposed cells can be 100 times better than that of DRAM memory. At the same time, the speed of the new ULTRARAM memory, as scientists called it, is comparable to the speed of DRAM and falls within 10 ns in terms of speed.
Currently, scientists are engaged in the design of ULTRARAM arrays and the transfer of solutions to silicon. The stage of designing logical nodes for writing and reading data from cells has also begun. It's funny that scientists have already registered a trademark for the new memory (see picture above).
Source: 3dnews.ru