IBM has made some breakthrough research which could significantly change the way memory is implemented in future smartphones and make them speedier than ever before. The discovery is related to Phase-Change Memory or PCM, the type of memory that has been in use for creating CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs for well over a decade.
Reporting on the discovery, Engadget's Steve Dent explains the way PCM works:
"To store PCM data on a Blu-ray disk, you apply a high current to amorphous (non-crystalline) glass materials, transforming them into a more conductive crystale form. To read it back, you apply a lower voltage to measure conductivity -- when it's high, the state is "1," and when it's low, it's "0." By heating up the materials, more states can be stored, but the problem is that the crystals can "drift" depending on the ambient temperature."
This means that the storage cells in PCM are either "on" or "off" and offer a lower density of data per cell than other memory types, which means that in order to store more information a lot more PCM needs to be used and the cost (not to mention practicality) becomes problematic. IBM's researchers have figured out a way to reliably store and recover three bits of data per cell rather than just one even at variable temperatures. That means the density can be tripled, and as a result PCM is more cost effective than it was before; it is faster than current flash memory used for storage and more stable than RAM used for buffering CPUs. It's quite possible PCM will replace both flash memory and, to a certain extent, RAM in future mobile phones (though RAM is still faster for some tasks).
"Reaching 3 bits per cell is a significant milestone because at this density the cost of PCM will be significantly less than DRAM and closer to flash," says Dr. Haris Pozidis from IBM Research. The researchers also suggested some innovative ways in which the use of PCM could enhance our smartphones, one given example would be to put a phone's entire operating system on PCM memory which would rapidly increase boot speeds to only a few seconds, as well as enhance performance and responsivness across the board. This is similar to what some PC power-users already do by installing an operating system on a dedicated SATA solid state drive (SSD) while other programs and applications are put on a regular drive - although all the new benefits of PCM will apply just as much to desktops as they will to phones.
Speed increases could be beneficial in a number of ways, according to the research the PCM data can be read in less than one microsecond compared to flash reading in 70 microseconds. The researchers believe this could help a number of back-end services operate more efficiently, for example, if implemented at a server level for something like Siri or Google Maps as well as on your phone, you could be looking at a much smoother experience when asking questions or looking up locations. It's also thought this could push AI development even further.
As with many tech breakthroughs, there's still much to do to refine the findings and make them commercially viable, so we could be looking at several years before it starts appearing in new devices. Still, interesting nonetheless.
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