LONDON – A team of students and researchers from the University of California, San Diego, is about to demonstrate a phase-change memory solid-state storage system that it claims is up to seven times faster than current solid-state drives.
The device, called Moneta, was developed in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and is set to be demonstrated June 6 to June 8 at the Design Automation Conference, which is being held in San Diego, this week.
Unfortunately, UCSD did not disclose the size of the SSD or how many memory modules or 128-Mbit chips are in use, or the connection methods used. According to a paper that appears to be earmarked for presentation at the Hot Storage 2011 event later this month, the Onyx memory module, contains 80 128-Mbit phase-change memories and connects to the host system using the PCIe bus standard. UCSD did say that the team has received help from Micron Technology Inc., which has provided non-volatile phase-change memories, BEEcube and Xilinx Inc.
Although faster than magnetic hard disk drives, flash memory based solid-state drives (SSDs) are still too slow to meet high performance computing demands where there is the necessity to sift through data quickly, the University of California San Diego (UCSD) said. Examples where PCM solid-state storage could help include analyzing scientific data collected by environmental sensors and search engines, UCSD added.
Phase-change memory stores data in terms of the difference resistance of a chalcogenide material depending on whether it is a crystalline and amorphous state. Data is written by the application of heat through an electrical current and read by use of a smaller current to determine which state the material is in.
A view inside the Moneta storage array from UCSD.