The image represents a memory cell, with the yellow patch being the phase-change material called GST, which sits on a waveguide
When it comes to new enhances to computers everyone wants faster response times and overall better performance. A team of researchers from top ranked universities found a way to increase computers performance by changing the way they access and store data.
Data stored on a computer needs to be there when power is is either on or off. This is called non-volatile memory and devices that have this property are CD’s, DVD’s and hard disks. Although devices like these provide data storage, they are really slow compared to CPU. Exactly how slow? Same as email and pony express.
This is a huge step in technology since it would allow computers to become much faster overall. It would also help the CS community deal with technical difficulties that arise from memory accesses like blocking an execution path until memory read/write is complete. The earlier example is hard to handle with today’s technology, since it introduces many possible hard-to-discover errors that may cause abnormal behavior.
This problem encountered in Computer Science is called the von Neumann bottleneck. Even though you can increase the performance of the CPU, you still waste many cycles waiting for memory/hard disk to respond to the requests. “There’s no point using faster processors if the limiting factor is the shuttling of information to-and-from the memory”, explains the University of Oxford’s Professor Harish Bhaskaran, leader of the research project, in a statement.
Professor Harish Bhaskaran and together with his team have built the world’s first all-photonic non-volatile memory chip. The chip provides incredible data reads and writes given we are using light and not electronic signals. However that is not the only major property of it; it also allows for simultaneous reads and writes, a world first as well.
The next steps of this projects are deploying the chip and integrating it with existent configurations in the industry, as well as building interfaces with different modules.
Radu Nesiu
Credit: Image by Wolfram Pernice
