What would be lovely is a type of memory which is both fast to write, and non-volatile. So, along comes something called magnetoresistive random access memory or Mram.
A couple of weeks ago a company called Freescale announced that it had produced a working Mram chip which can hold four-megabits, that is about half a megabyte. It is very small compared to the Ram and flash chips on the market, but it is a start. In fact many companies, including IBM, have been working on the nanotechnology behind Mram for around a decade.
Put simply, Mram stores data magnetically, in the same way a hard drive does. This makes it non-volatile. It is also very quick, and does not wear out over time. So it seems to have the advantages of both RAM and flash, with none of the disadvantages.
Read this article from BBC Technology News
*Find out more about “MRAM” at the Whats New Media Wiki
