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Flash memory is fast, it’s stable, but it’s not without its flaws. It has a tendency to wear out after too many write-erase cycles, for example. Now there’s a way to deal with that problem, and it could lead to self-healing NAND flash memory that could last for much, much longer than the stuff we have now.
The discovery comes from Taiwan-based company Macronix who realized that the key to long-lasting NAND memory is the strategic application of heat. If you bake the memory at a heat of around 480 degrees Fahrenheit for a few hours, you can breathe some of the life back into it. The problem is that isn’t exactly practical.
Macronix is working on a solution that is more practical, though: a chip with on-board heaters. Instead of baking the whole chip, it would jolt unused-but-aging sectors with a super blast of heat (about 1,400 degrees) every now and then. This could give chips a lifespan of roughly 100 million cycles, orders of magnitude more than the current highs of 100,000 to 1 million.
Before you get too excited, commercial versions are not inbound yet. Macronix will instead be presenting the tech at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting. It’s still an exciting development nonetheless and is sure to make it into consumer goodies sooner or later. Hopefully sooner. [PhysOrg]
So. The CPU loves being cooled. GPU too. RAM performs better when cold. So does the Flash memory itself. Right. But we are willing to give all this up just for the extra longevity of 1 component?
But there’s a possibility that the cooling and heating segments could work in tandem: the cooling system would retain heat which could, I suppose, be transferred to the section that needs heating.
No as the heat has to be only at specific times and very hot.
You’ve not understood the concept. It very briefly heats a very small amount of mass up to a very high temperature. That’ll have next to no effect on large scale cooling. It’s not going to be sitting there at that temperature constantly.
Ajbwalker, I refer you to the laws of thermodynamics, which will teach you why what you just said is absurd and improve your general understanding of the universe greatly.
And finally to the writer of the article, can we PLEASE include Celsius for those of us not stuck in the 20th century when it comes to units? The world switched scales for a good reason.
No, I’ve understood the concept, the flash memory has to be heated to ~250 degrees celsius. In a sealed box, no matter how small the mass is, the heating/cooling system will have to become so complex to counteract this, it just won’t be worth it.
No, you’re being daft, temperature and thermal energy do not = each other.
I know! My point is that my laptop already borderline overheats, I understand they aren’t equal, but an increase in one NORMALLY leads to an increase in the other, and I guess my point is, it’s not worth the extra complexity.
No need to get your panties in a twist. And I wasn’t suggesting that the transfer of heat would be 100% efficient. Heat blown out of a computer is waste heat and therefore could be possibly used to heat these components. In the same way some cars use the heat of the engine to heat the air conditioning.
You can’t use waste heat at 30 degrees to heat components to hundreds of degrees. That’s not how physics works, I’m afraid. If it was, all our devices would be massively more energy efficient.