Two new non-volatile semiconductor memory technologies are being explored in the hope of finding a chip that is fast and cheap enough to replace rotating storage for mass memory: Intel Corp is ready with a 256K flash memory chip, in which electrons are accelerated to the point where they cross the boundary into a floating gate, remaining there until the gate is discharged to erase the data – and Seeq Technology and Toshiba Corp are also exploring the technology; and, reports the New York Times, two US start-ups, Ramtron Corp in Colorado Springs and Krysalis Corp of Albuquerque, New Mexico are working on ferroelectric memory, where positive and negative electric charges are used to store data in a ferrous cermamic, in a way similar to the use of magnetic polarity to record and erase data on a disk.
