In a world fixated on the race for superior artificial intelligence ( AI), Chinese scientists have cracked the code to memory speeds once deemed impossible – with a device smaller than a grain of rice.
Scientists at Fudan University on Thursday unveiled “Poxiao”, or Dawn, the fastest flash memory ever created, which can remove and update information in 400 picoseconds. One picosecond is one twentieth of a minute.
While the existing design holds just kilobytes – barely enough to show this tale – its innovative style shatters the rate barriers of contemporary storage by 100,000 times, promising a future where AI brains is read and write as fast as they think.
Published in the journal Nature, this step in particle physics perhaps soon blur the line between recollection and computing.
Overcoming the limits of data backup velocity has long been one of the most important challenges in the integrated circuit field, and it is also a key professional bottleneck restricting the potential of Artificial computing power.
Existing storage designs come with persistent limitations. While dangerous memory – like SRAM and DRAM – offers higher speeds, it suffers from low potential, high power consumption, high production costs, and data loss when electricity is cut. Non-volatile storage – like flash store – offers larger power, lower power consumption, and data resilience, but lags far behind in velocity.
The research group aimed to promote flash memory – harnessing its strengths while addressing its velocity limitations.
The standard storage system of flash memory is a floating-gate circuit, in which particles move in and out of a command storage area under the influence of energy, enabling data recording. “ In the past, the approach to speeding up flash memory involved pre-accelerating the electrons, allowing them to gain energy before entering and exiting, ” project leader Liu Chunsen said in a statement from Fudan University.
But under traditional theoretical models, this “warm-up ” process is slow, and there is a speed ceiling, preventing flash memory from exceeding theoretical speed limits.
“It’s been 60 years since Bell Labs introduced the floating-gate circuit. If we had just stuck with traditional beliefs or focused on material changes, we had n’t had made any significant achievements. That is why we have focused on developing a completely new approach to flash memory, ” Liu said.
The researchers introduced a new approach to accelerate flash memory, allowing electrons to directly transition from a low-speed to a high-speed state without the need for a “warm-up ” phase. This new theory – called “2D-enhanced hot-carrier injection ” – led to the development of a prototype device.
In tests, the erase-write speed reached 400 picoseconds, surpassing the world’s fastest volatile memory, SRAM, at the same technology node. Compared to the hundreds of microseconds of ordinary flash memory, the speed improved by more than 100,000 times.
According to an article on Fudan University’s website, it is the world’s fastest semiconductor storage technology to date, achieving equal storage and computation speeds. “Once scaled up for mass integration, it is expected to completely disrupt the current storage architecture, ” the article said.
“Based on this technology, future personal computers may no longer need to differentiate between memory and external storage, eliminating the need for hierarchical storage systems, and enabling the local deployment of large AI models, ” the report added.
The team began researching flash memory devices in 2015. In 2021, they proposed an initial theoretical model, and last year, they developed a superfast flash memory device with an 8-nanometre channel length, surpassing the physical size limit of silicon-based flash memory, which was around 15 nanometres.
The “Poxiao” flash memory device is now moving towards production. Combined with CMOS technology, the chip has already been successfully fabricated at the kilobyte level.
Within five years, the team hopes to scale it to tens of megabytes and have it licensed and ready to market. – South China Morning Post