Forever Flash

In the world of memory chips, flash is king. But it´s not perfect. It wears out after being programmed and erased about 10 000 times. That´s fine for a USB dongle that you´ll probably lose in a year, but not ideal for the solid-state drives of server farms. And the same problem keeps manufacturers from using flash to replace other types of computer memories. This month, at the 2012 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, engineers from Macronix plan to report the invention of a self-healing NAND flash memory that survives more than 100 million cycles.