Samsung tinkers with phase-change memory

Offers 20% more smartphone battery life

Samsung tinkers with phase-change memory

30 April 2010 15:22 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Not content with battery life on current phones available in the market, Samsung is experimenting with a new type of memory that it claims could boost the time between charges by as much as 20%.

It's called phase-change memory, and the most common implementation uses an alloy of germanium, antimony and titanium to create a material that can form into two different states with dfifferent resistances when it's heated (by applying a voltage). Those states can be used to represent binary 1s and 0s, meaning that it can be used to store data as memory.

Samsung will be making memory units from the substance 512MB in size, which will be used in the next generation of its smartphones, as well as some of its existing ones. It should operate up to 10x faster than existing memory, however, as well as offering the aforementioned energy-saving benefits.

The company said that eventually it expects phase-change memory to appear in place of current memory modules in most equipment.

Via: news.bbc.co.uk

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