Chinese teams report memory breakthrough with 10 billion writing cycles and 100x endurance

Researchers in China appear to have developed a memory design that can complete some 10 billion writing cycles, according to TechRadar and author Christian Cawley. That would be 100 times more than the previous limit reported for the technology.

Teams at Xidian University worked with the City University of Hong Kong and Fudan University on the study, which was recently published in Science. The work focuses on wurtzite ferroelectrics, including aluminium scandium nitride (AlScN), a material compatible with semiconductor manufacturing processes currently in use.

Earlier AlScN chips had failed after around 100 million writing cycles. The researchers linked that reliability problem to missing nitrogen atoms, known as nitrogen vacancies. During repeated switching, the vacancies could move and cluster, creating pathways through which electricity leaked.

The team designed a structure intended to minimise those vacancies and slow material deterioration. Wang Ruiqing, a doctoral researcher at Xidian University and one of the paper’s authors, compared the material to a cornfield with missing seedlings. Wang said the researchers had previously observed failure symptoms but had not explained at the atomic scale what moved or how that movement caused failure.

If the approach succeeds, AlScN-based RAM and storage could support future server farms and help provide infrastructure for larger language models and artificial intelligence systems. The source presents this as a potential development, not a current commercial product.