Some guys from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and the University of Tokyo claim that they’ve developed techniques to make flash chips a bit more robust.

Current flash chips have about a finite lifetime of reads & writes due to the design of the technology. As the chip sizes get smaller, this number drops quickly. This makes the life spans of SSD based hard drives in particular a bit worrisome.

Using nano sized ferroelectric cells they are able to reach a much higher density of cells on individual chips. This allows not only increased reliability at a smaller scale, but also lets wear leveling work better as a larger portion of cells can be isolated as they fail.

Of course the biggest leap is that the nano ferroelectric cells are much more energy efficient, using under a third of the power, 6 volts vs the traditional 20 volts.

No doubt this technology is years away still, but flash memory uses increase every day. With higher density, and lower power, new chips will be welcomed with open arms.

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