Dutch Philips Electronics said on Wednesday its researchers have come up with a new material to integrate memory in very advanced semiconductors featuring very thin circuits. The new material needs only a tiny voltage to switch between on and off phases, which is used to 'remember' the data stored on a chip. This makes it useful for future chips that will have thinner and smaller circuits and which will work with lower power levels than current chips.
The material will remember the data after the power of the chip has been switched off, similar to today's Flash memory chips used in portable music players and digital cameras.
"Unlike existing memory technologies such as Flash memory, the performance of this new memory improves in virtually every respect the smaller you make it," Philips Research said in a statement, ahead of a publication in Nature Materials in April.
It will meet requirements for memory that needs to be integrated into a system on a chip by 2007 or 2008.
By that time, chips will have circuits as thin 50 nanometers, compared with today's leading edge 90 nanometer chip making technology.
A nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter.