| Developers: | Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) |
| Date of the premiere of the system: | 2017 |
| Branches: | Electrical equipment and microelectronics |
Physicists from Russia and France announced in the summer of 2017 type of the RAM combining the high speed of work of a conventional electronic memory and low power consumption of magnetic information media, said in article published in[1][2].
"The industry of RAM is very strongly developed today, its speeds become more and more, however there is an essential shortcoming which does not manage to be overcome yet — its low energy efficiency. The magnetic and electric storage cell created by us will allow to reduce energy costs for record and reading in tens of thousands of times" — Sergey Nikitov, the director of Institute of radio engineering and electronics of RAS and the head of the department in MIPT tells.
So far semiconductor OZU remains the only type of "fast" memory which found broad application among all types of computing devices. Practically all optical and ferromagnetic technologies of instant record and reading of information competing with it suffer from massive faults which do not allow to make them commercially effective. In particular, it is interfered by high heat release, impossibility of miniaturization or special sensitivity to environmental conditions.
Nikitov and his colleagues from MIPT, IRE RAS and some other the Russian and foreign scientific organizations took the first step to liquidation of "monopoly" of a semiconductor memory, having developed new superfast and at the same time practical type of memory which they called MELRAM.
The main problem of all magnet systems of record and reading information as scientists note, the fact that it is extremely difficult to reduce cells of a magnetic memory as for their work very sensitive and fine sensors and sources of magnetic fields are required is.
The Russian physicists found out that this problem can be solved by means of special materials whose magnetic properties change at their extension or compression. These deformations can be created, using piezoelectric materials whose form changes at transmission through them electric current.
Being guided by this idea, Nikitov's team stuck together two pieces of such materials and used this "sandwich" for creation of cells of magnetoelectric memory where zero and unit are designated by the direction of magnetization, but not electric charge of the condenser, as in normal RAM. Respectively, to write data in MELRAM, it is necessary to pass current through a piezoelement, and for their reading — to measure tension of the current passing through storage cell.
Similar storage cells have two main pluses: information is stored in them prior to the first reading actually eternally, and it does not need to be updated constantly — as in normal RAM. Besides, they can be reduced to the sizes of transistors as for work of MELRAM external sensors of magnetic field are not necessary.
According to authors of work, upon transition to the small sizes the operability of the solution proposed by them will not worsen in any way, so, it is possible to claim that MELRAM have good perspectives in the field of ADP equipment with strict requirements to energy consumption.
See Also
Notes
| The site content is translated by machine translation software powered by PROMT. The machine-translated articles are not always perfect and may contain errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. Read original article If you find inaccuracies or errors in the results of machine translation, please write to editor@tadviser.ru. We will make every effort to correct them as soon as possible. |