Computed·Blg

Via Outside Innovation

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Over the past few months, there have been a number of notable service quality incidents and security breaches of online services, including Sony’s PlayStation network, Amazon’s cloud service, Dropbox’s storage in the cloud, and countless others. The bar talk around “cloud” computing and online services would have you think that businesses and consumers are shying away from using hosted services, using Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, from storing their data “in the cloud,” or from migrating some or all of their computing infrastructure to virtual machines hosted by cloud service providers. However, there’s actually an uptick in the uptake of cloud computing in all of its various incarnations.

We (consumers and businesses) are using “cloud” services for all of the following kinds of activities:

1. Accessing and downloading media.

2. Accessing and downloading mobile apps.

3. Accessing and running business applications (CRM, hiring, ecommerce, logistics, provisioning, etc.).

4. Collaborating with colleagues, clients, and customers (project management, online communities, email, meeting scheduling).

5. Analyzing large amounts of data.

6. Storing large amounts of data (much of it unstructured, like video, images, text files, etc.).

7. Developing and testing new applications and online services.

8. Running distributed applications that need high performance around the globe. (All of the social media apps we use are essentially “cloud” applications—they run on virtual machines hosted in mostly 3rd-party data centers all over the world.)

9. Scaling our operations to handle seasonal and other peaking requirements—where we can take advantage of buying computing capabilities by the hour, rather than pre-paying for capacity we rarely need.

10. Back up and Disaster Recovery—keeping copies of our systems and data in remote locations, ready to run if a natural disaster impacts our normal operations.

In short, “cloud computing” in all of its instantiations—Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Cloud Storage, Cloud Computing, etc.—is here to stay. Taking advantage of the cloud (virtual computers running software in data centers distributed around the globe) is the most scalable and the most cost-effective way to provide computing resources and services to anyone who has reliable access to high bandwidth networking via the Internet.

What About Security and Back Up?
Most of us now realize that we’re responsible for the security and integrity of our information no matter where it sits on the planet. And we are better off if we have more than one copy of anything that’s really important.

SaaS and cloud providers have had a lot of experience helping IT organizations migrate some or all of their computing and/or storage to the cloud. And most of them report that most IT organizations’ data security practices leave quite a bit to be desired before they migrate to the cloud. Their customers’ data security and integrity typically improves dramatically as a result of re-thinking their requirements and implementing better policies and practices as they migrated some or all of their computing. (Just because data is in your own physical data center doesn’t mean it’s safe!)

It’s Time to Run Around in Front of the Cloud Parade
We’re now committed to living in the mobile Internet era. We treasure our mobility and our unfettered access to information, applications, media, and services. Cloud computing, in all its forms, is here to stay. Small businesses and innovative service providers have embraced cloud computing and services wholeheartedly and are already reaping the benefits of “pay as you consume” for software and computing and storage services. Medium-sized businesses are the next to embrace cloud computing, because they typically don’t have the inertia and overhead that comes with a huge centralized IT organization. Large enterprises’ IT organizations are the last to officially accept cloud computing as a safe and compliant alternative for corporate IT. Yet many departments in those same large enterprise organizations have been the early adopters of cloud computing for the development and testing of new software products and for the departmental (or even corporate) adoption of SaaS for many of their companies’ most critical applications.

Via ars technica

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Flash memory is the dominant nonvolatile (retaining information when unpowered) memory thanks to its appearance in solid-state drives (SSDs) and USB flash drives. Despite its popularity, it has issues when feature sizes are scaled down to 30nm and below. In addition, flash has a finite number of write-erase cycles and slow write speeds (on the order of ms). Because of these shortcomings, researchers have been searching for a successor even as consumers snap up flash-based SSDs.

There are currently a variety of alternative technologies competing to replace silicon-based flash memory, such as phase-change RAM (PRAM), ferroelectric RAM (FERAM), magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM), and resistance-change RAM (RRAM). So far, though, these approaches fail to scale down to current process technologies well—either the switching mechanism or switching current perform poorly at the nanoscale. All of them, at least in their current state of development, also lack some commercially-important properties such as write-cycle endurance, long-term data retention, and fast switching speed. Fixing these issues will be a basic requirement for next-gen non-volatile memory. 

Or, as an alternative, we might end up replacing this tech entirely. Researchers from Samsung and Sejong University in Korea have published a paper in Nature Materials that describes tanatalum oxide-based (TaO_x) resistance-RAM (RRAM), which shows large improvements over current technology in nearly every respect.

RRAM devices work by applying a large enough voltage to switch material that normally acts as an insulator (high-resistance state) into a low-resistance state. In this case, the device is a sandwich structure with a TaO_2-x base layer and a thinner Ta₂O_5-x insulating layer, surrounded by platinum (Pt) electrodes. This configuration, known as metal-insulator-base-metal (MIMB), starts as an insulator, but it can be switched to a low resistance, metal-metal (filament)-base-metal (MMBM) state.

The nature of the switching process is not well understood in this case, but the authors describe it as relying on the creation of conducting filaments that extend through the Ta₂O_5-x layer. These paths are created by applying sufficiently large voltages, which drive the movement of oxygen ions through a redox (reduction-oxidaton) process.

When in the MIMB state, the interface between the Pt electrode and the Ta₂O_5-x forms a metal-semiconductor junction known as a Schottky barrier, while the MMBM state forms an ohmic contact. The main difference between these two is that the current-voltage profile is linear and symmetric for ohmic but nonlinear and asymmetric for Schottky. The presence of Schottky barriers is a benefit, as it prevents stray current leakage through an array of multiple devices (important for high-density storage).

The results presented by the authors appear to blow other memory technologies out of the water, in pretty much every way we care about. The devices presented here are 30nm thick, and the switching current is 50 ?A—an order of magnitude smaller than that of PRAM. They also demonstrated an endurance of greater than 10¹² switching cycles (higher than the previous best of 10¹⁰ and six orders of magnitude higher than that of flash memory at 10⁴-10⁶). The device has a switching time of 10ns, and a data retention time that's estimated to be 10 years operating at 85°C. This type of RRAM also appears to work without problems in a vacuum, unlike previously-demonstrated devices.

This may all seem too good to be true—it should be emphasized that this was only a laboratory-scale demonstration, with 64 devices in an array (therefore capable of storing only 64 bits). There will still be a few years of development needed before we see gigabyte-size drives based on this RRAM memory.

Like all semiconductor device fabrication, advances will be needed to improve nanoscale lithography techniques for large-scale manufacturing and, in this particular case, a better understanding of the basic switching mechanism is also needed. However, based on the results shown here, this new memory technology shows promise for use as a universal memory storage: the same type could be used for storage and working memory.