Today’s SATA Solid State Drives sports read and write speeds of up to 250MB/s, which is indeed impressive. Toshiba has announced a new kind of non-volatile RAM that like flash memory keeps the data when the power is cut and at the same time FeRAM (Ferroelectric Random Access Memory) has characteristics that puts performance in the range of regular RAM. Toshiba has developed a 128Mb circuit that use an integrated DDR2 interface that can achieve read/write speed at 1.6 GB/s. Performance not before seen at these storage densities.
Even if Toshiba has come a long way to increase the storage density of FeRAM it is still the drawback of the new memory technology, it is still far from the capacities of regular Flash memory. FeRAM still offers up to 8 times the performance of Flash memory, while the data can be stored up to 10 years.
“Toshiba will continue R&D in FeRAM, aiming for further capacity increases and eventual use in a wide range of applications, including the main memory of mobile phones, mobile consumer products, and cache memory applications in products such as mobile PCs and SSDs.”
We will continue to follow the development of FeRAM and drool over the through of SSDs with transfer rates measured in GB/s.
