By Timothy Prickett Morgan

Fast and reliable non-volatile memory of some sort that will replace flash memory is the dream of more than a few semiconductor researchers and chip makers. And boffins at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, think they have come up with a new encoding technique that will allow for multi-level cell (MLC) phase change memory to be commercialized at some point in the not too distant future.

Phase change memory is based on an interesting goop called chalcogenide compounds, which are used in rewriteable CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray disks. These chalcogenide compounds have a polycrystalline state as well as an amorphous state, and the state can be changed with the application of a laser beam or an electric current, both of which heat the material to change it from crystal to amorphous state, allowing for the encoding of the 1s and 0s of binary data in spots on the compound.

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