March 2006

Intel Corp. sees current flash memory technology sustaining until the end of the decade, pushing out the need for "universal memory" until 2010, according to Greg Komoto, manager of strategic planning for Intel's flash memory group.
Speaking at a session at the Intel Developer Forum (March 8), Komoto said Intel continues to believe that ovonic unified memory (OUM), also known as phase-change memory, is the most promising nonvolatile memory alternative, more so than magnetic RAM (MRAM) or ferro-electric RAM (FeRAM), which are also being studied as potential replacements.
Komoto said OUM shows the most promise based on its scaling path, declining cost basis and the fact that it is bit-alterable.

Read more here

A team of scientists from the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with colleagues from the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) and the Spintec laboratory (Grenoble, France), has for the first time produced microscopic magnetic states, known as “displaced vortex states”, that will allow an increase in the size of MRAMs.
The “displaced vortex states”, first observed by UAB researchers, are small circular movements of just a few thousandths of a millimetre that form in the tiny zones where the data is stored. The information on hard drives has normally been saved by orientating these zones in specific directions. The zones pointing upwards, for example, codify a 1, and those pointing downwards a 0. The smaller and more compact these zones are, the greater the capacity of the hard drive. But if they are too close together, the magnetic field created by one can affect the neighbouring zone and wipe the data. However, if the field is saved in a whirlpool form, in “vortex state”, it does not leave the tiny zone to which it is confined and does not affect the neighbouring data, thus making it possible for a much larger hard drive capacity.

Read more here