Metal nanocrystals promise to double flash memory capacity

There's certainly no shortage of folks trying to create bigger, better flash memory, but upstart Nanosys seems to think it's found a winning formula, and it's apparently already got some big names on board. Key to its solution are so-called "self-assembled metal nanocrystals" which, when added to the flash manufacturing process, supposedly doubles the capacity of conventional chips. According to MIT's Technology Review, the crystals themselves are "grown" in a liquid solution and then spun onto silicon wafers -- not an entirely new process, but Nanosys has apparently come up with a chemical process that produces crystals that are more uniform in size and spacing than previous attempts by others. That's apparently been enough to attract the interest of Intel and Micron, who Nanosys says could be putting the technology to use as soon as 2009.

[Herbert Neal @ Jul 21st 2007 12:14PM]

Will this make my iPhone work better?

[slojohn @ Jul 21st 2007 12:18PM]

Your iPhone will never work as well as Generation 2

[Rainbow6vegas @ Jul 21st 2007 12:25PM]

What do you mean by "making your iphone work better"? Can you be more specific? There's already enough Apple spam on these boards... so thanks for your contribution in making these boards utterly useless. If you don't have anything worthwhile to say... just keep your mind-to-keyboard diarhea to yourself.

[Jake @ Jul 21st 2007 12:30PM]

Rainbow6vegas ,
1) he's just trolling , making fun of the excessive iPhone coverage
2) there aren't boards , this is just a news site with comments.

[ssuk @ Jul 21st 2007 2:54PM]

boards... oh you guys, you slay me. Now gb2/gaia/.

[Jeff @ Jul 21st 2007 11:27PM]

Does the IPhone not have a flash memory?

[Dan @ Jul 22nd 2007 10:10PM]

I can't wait until SS storage becomes mainstream. And no, I don't mean puny 32GB.

[C.k @ Jul 23rd 2007 3:58PM]

Herbert, you're a funnah man ... and Rainbow is even funnier, thinking that Herbert was actually being serious. That is ... if he really wasn't being serious, and instead was making fun of Apple, and all the news created by them - well, for them (maybe by them, FOR them? hm...).

Anyway, this would definitely be interesting - I wonder how it holds up to r/w cycles? Flash drives, after all, can't be written to nearly as much as hard drives ... though some may question if it's necessary.

Another question, that's semi-random. With the advent of MS's new USB RAM, how badly does that burn up the read-write cycles?

[C.k @ Jul 23rd 2007 3:59PM]

never mind, I'm an idiot for not reading the entire article before commenting
okay, so about infinity read/write cycles with the new tech

that still doesn't answer my (slightly off-topic) question about how MS's USB RAM impacts standard flash ... I guess it depends on how much it is relied upon. If a person has 128MB of RAM, and a gig USB drive, then it'd probably be hit harder, last less, eh?