A couple of weeks ago, one of my lab associates made a comment about the advantages of the I-RAM and its speed with respect to the hard drive. What is an I-RAM? I asked. Simple. They are a bank of DDR memories that are used as a hard drive. They are powered through a PCI port and use a SATA connector that goes to the mother board.

Bottom line, an I-RAM emulates a SATA hard drive. The volatility problem associated to RAM memories is solved with the constant feed that it receives from the board through the PCI port. Even if there is a blackout, the I-RAM even has a small battery that can hold for some time.

Advantages? Incredibly Fast.

Problems? Various. RAM memories are still expensive and generally not as big as a hard drive. For now, the first designs allow the creation of a memory bank of up to 4GB in storage capacity. But lets imagine this is only the beginning.

At the same time, while I was doing some research on I-RAMs I ran into some information about a new concept, the M-RAM (Magnetic Random Access Memory). Different to conventional Technologies of RAM memory chips, the data is not stored by electrical charges of current flow, but by means of magnetic storage elements.

This Technologies main advantage is that the chips keep the information stored even after the system is turned off, which means that computers and other devices can now be supplied with non volatile memory ready to use at the moment the devices are turned on. Together with this, the MRAM requires less memory refresh than the capacitor based DRAMs and its theoretical velocity competes with that of the static RAM, the main component of the CPUs cache.

The way an MRAM works is based on the implementation of bits as minuscule magnetic fields that are generated on the intersections of a grid of tracks in dimensions measured in the nanometer range. When the current tries to flow through one of the tracks, opposing the polarization of one of those magnetic field bits, the current flow is mitigated and therefore the value of the stored bit can be detected.

Well, considering that we had to upgrade one of the computers in our lab, we recently purchased and I-RAM to run the first tests. Unfortunately we have still not received it, but as soon as we get it we will post the results of the tests. I cant wait to start the testing.