Not to further confuse followers of technology minutiae and the merely curious, but the memory gods has seen fit to further muddle up the waters with a new kind of memory technology to add to the confusing alphabet soup of memory types like RAM, DDR, NAND, SSD, DRAM and the like. This time, this new addition is potentially something to really look forward to.

The Nanochip, Inc. company has been hard at work at this array-based memory type that aims to break the oft-quoted Moore’s Law that states that the number of transistors on a piece of circuitry increases around every 18 months, based on the lithography process that governs how small the metal traces on the circuit can be made. The recent few years has shown amazing advances for this type of circuit-building, in materials science and in electronics both.

                                             IBM's Millepede concept operated on the same principle of multiple points of access to the storage medium.

With Nanochip’s design, a grid of super-small probes is arrayed against a recording material. Instead of trying to get the traces as thin as possible, while spending the money for the relevant equipment, the grid is instead moved around in relation to the recording material. Nanochip theorizes that they can potentially build a memory array capable of moving the grid one atom at a time, at which point multi-terabyte chips are within the realm of possibility. At this point in time however, the technology is at the point of equality with current memory-chip technology, meaning “tens of gigabytes” per integrated circuit will initially be introduced.

                                             A turntable operates on basically the same concept as this cutting-edge memory type.

Flash-based memory currently retails at around $15 to $18 per gigabyte, and while this new array-based technology does not yet have a street price nor estimate, its ability to be manufactured using current circuit printing machines (plus the fact that newer memory circuitry requires upgrading to manufacturing machines with ever-smaller lithography capabilities every few years) mean that this technology will most definitely be cheaper than current versions.

Eventually, one terabyte on a single chip is more than possible. The best news is, the process leading to this size won’t be following the slow progression of normal flash memory and other types of circuits, since it is essentially based on a smart application of currently existing technology (and the application of currently available manufacturing processes); this technology will progress from its targeted debut size of tens of gigabytes sometime in 2010, to 100 GB in perhaps 2012, and finally 1 TB around 10-12 years from now.

                                             A terabyte in a flash disc?

Some problems of note include the fact that flash memory is a moving target – while at first blush array-based memory is cheaper than flash’s current generation, by 2010, flash may be hitting the single digits per gigabyte of storage. Array-based memory must be able to match that. Another problem is that of durability. With hundreds if not thousands of microscopic probes (potentially) 3-5 nm in size, some of these may wear out too quickly for enterprise use, or even normal consumer usage. Yet if these hurdles are breached, and this type of memory takes off, prepare for a shakedown in storage technology, at least until the next bit of high-tech wizardry.