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Alloy Holds Out Promise of Speedier Memory Chip Scientists at IBM and two partner companies have developed a promising material that they believe will lead to a new kind of computer memory chip able to meet the growing appetite for storing digital music, pictures and video. The advance will be described in a technical paper to be presented Monday at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco by researchers from IBM and two computer memory manufactures, Qimonda and Macronix. The scientists have designed a new semiconductor alloy derived from materials currently used in optical storage devices like CDs and DVDs. This team is not the only entrant in the race to find alternatives to flash memory, the prevailing form of nonvolatile storage--so called because it can retain information without power. Intel and STMicroelectronics have formed a partnership to pursue the technology, and, separately, Samsung has made announcements in the field. Intel has shown 128-megabit prototype chips and said it planned to introduce products in 2007. Samsung has described a 512-megabit prototype that it expects to market in 2008. IBM scientists say their announcement is significant because the company s new material has performance advantages over alloys now in use in prototypes made by others in the industry If the technology proves cheap enough to manufacture, it will create a new competitor in the $18.6 billion market for the inexpensive erasable memory chips that have proliferated in mobile phones, music players and other consumer gadgets in recent years. | 
