by CHRISTOPHER MIMS, Technology Review
As the Google Chromebook, MacBook Air and a host of other laptops that incorporate solid state drives amply demonstrated, replacing hard drives with the same kind of flash memory present in thumb drives and memory cards can radically reduce the time it takes a computer to boot up. Now researchers at a trio of NSF-supported Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers have demonstrated the tantalizing possibility of an even faster kind of solid-state memory. Ferroelectric materials can already be found in everything with an RFID chip — which includes the kind of smart cards common in Europe, more advanced subway card systems like those in DC and Boston, and those easy pay key fobs you can use at the gas station. In these applications they work well, but they had yet to be incorporated into honest-to-goodness silicon computer chips until the most recent discovery.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27333/?p1=blogs
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