August 10, 2004
Technology in Focus features analysis of recent technology news articles, by the consultants in Technology Group, IDA. This is the top pick of the month from a list of 10-20 news analysis compiled monthly.
A New Spin on Mobile Memory, 22 July 2004
by Steven Ong, ENAT Consultant
Market Trend
With the onslaught of digital age, megapixel cameras along with solid state MP3 players and feature rich handsets have fuelled the need for storage media with larger data capacity. Most handsets in the market currently carried just enough ROM for basic PIM functionality and its own operating system. The trend however shows that phones with removable storage will become a feature expected by consumers, especially with downloadable content such as ring tones, animated wall-paper, Java games, and very soon video files.
Limitations
Storage manufacturer have so far been able to improve on the data density (according to Moores Law) by doubling it approximately every 18 months, resulting in the reduction in cost for hard drives and flash memory over the years. As mentioned in the article, hard drives such as the Toshibas 0.8 inch diameter model though small in size, may still not satisfy handset manufacturers requirements. Other than the thickness issue, handsets are designed to withstand a 1.5-meter drop, something that could be tough for small drives. Also, the fact that hard drives draw a third more power than semiconductor-based memory causes it to impose additional constraint on an already limited battery power source. In comparison, flash media being a solid state memory does not have any mechanical parts, which therefore makes it more reliable and energy efficient. It does however face certain fabrication constraints which limits its memory size. It has been said that in as little as five years, the data capacity of flash memory would likely reach its physical limit and refuse to ascend any higher up Moores curve.
Nano Solution
Herein is where nanostorage technologies such as Spintronics stepped in. Spintronics is a field of nanotechnology that uses the directional spin, or magnetic alignment of electrons to indicate the 1s and 0s of binary computation. Information is written into spins as a particular spin orientation, either up or down, controllable by magnetic fields. With transistor based memory such as RAM and flash memory, where current is needed to effect a state change, power consumption and overheating problems increase as we try to pack more transistors onto every chip in an effort to increase memory capacity. Spintronic side step the issue with over heating by simply manipulating the magnetism of a material through the control of magnetic field (using minimal current) and aligning the spins of its constituent electrons in either one of two permanent states: up or down. Doing so, enable Spintronics module to consume less power and provide a means for fast non-volatile (faster than hard disk and flash memory but slower than SRAM) information storage and retrieval. All positive characteristics which endear the technology to mobile device manufacturers which constantly have to consider the trade-off between features, memory capacity and the limited power resources available on their mobile devices.
Of the several nascent Spintronics nano technologies, MRAM (short for Magneto Resistive Random Access Memory) is the furthest along. According to nanotechnology expert Howard Lovy, other than possessing the characteristics of a typical Spintronics, MRAM also has the potential to achieve terabyte of storage capacities. That however is still a distant realization at this point in time. Instead, what is achievable now is a 4Mbit nanostorage chip which Freescale (formerly Motorolas semiconductor unit) have announced would be made available by end of this year.
Much is expected from MRAM considering its potential to replace dynamic random access memory (DRAM), the computer processor, and the hard drive all within a single chip. The limited capacity thats available now will most definitely improve over time, as has been the case with all previous memory storage media. As said by the author of the article, one thing for certain -- spinning electrons are going to give spinning disks a run for their money.
Some words about the writer
Steven Ong is a consultant with the Technology Group, tasked with the responsibility of identifying, tracking and exploring leading edge enabler technologies in the mobile wireless arena. He is currently looking at areas such as Digital Rights Management, wireless security as well as smartphone application platforms.
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