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To: Seeker who wrote (4069)	5/13/1999 9:11:00 AM
From: Frank Brisebois	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18366

WHAT IS FLASH MEMORY? 4/23/93 Flash memory is a relatively new technology that is coming into wide use as a replacement for disk drives. In these applications, flash memory is faster and more rugged than a disk drive, plus it's lighter in weight and consumes less power. The ideal memory system is dense, fast, nonvolatile,inexpensive, and low in power consumption. Until flash memory, no memory system lived up to these ideals. Let's look at each of these features: DENSITY -- Chips up to 8 Mb (8 million bits) are available. A typical chip is arranged as 256 K x 8 (256 K words of 8 bits each). SPEED -- Compared to a disk drive, read access is far faster. Typical read access time is 80 ns (nanoseconds), and there is no delay for seek or latency time. Write access is somewhat slower, but still compares favorably to disk drives. NONVOLATILITY -- Unlike RAM, flash memories are nonvolatile, i.e. they retain their data after the power is turned off. In this feature, they are like ROMs, but unlike ROMs, flash memories can be easily erased and rewritten. COST -- Flash memory costs about the same (on a per-bit basis) as DRAM (dynamic RAM) and about 1/4 that of SRAM (static RAM). POWER CONSUMPTION -- When used to replace disc drives, flash memory consumes far less power. The downside is this: Unlike RAM, flash memories cannot be freely rewritten. If you want to rewrite a bit, you have to first erase the whole chip. This is done electrically, similar to the way it is done in an EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read only memory) and may take 1 or 2 seconds. Because of this, flash memories cannot be used to replace RAM. Furthermore there is a limit to the number of times a flash memory can be erased and rewritten. Flash memories are a good replacement for small hard discs (up to 20 Mbytes). They are also good for replacing the boot block of hard disks; the advantage here is that you can get your disc to boot very fast, in fact, in a flash!