FeRAM, or nonvolatile RAM, is for many the holy grail of computing, 100,000x faster than EEPROM and consuming way less energy, FeRAM will drastically change our computing habits. Today Toshiba announced their largest (128 Megabit) and fastest (1.6GB/s) FeRAM module.

Imagine for a second all the speed and advantage of the average RAM mixed with your HDD or SSD behavior (keeping data even if the module is powered off or not connected to a power source), This will make your average HDD or even SSD quite useless.

TOKYO–Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) today announced the prototype of a new FeRAM —Ferroelectric Random Access Memory—that redefines industry benchmarks for density and operating speed. The new chip realizes storage of 128-megabits and read and write speeds of 1.6-gigabytes a second, the most advanced combination of performance and density yet achieved. Full details of the new FeRAM will be presented this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference 2009 (ISSCC2009) in San Francisco, USA.

FeRAM combines the fast operating characteristics of DRAM with flash memory’s ability to retain data while powered off, attributes that continue to attract the attention of the semiconductor industry. Toshiba will continue R&D in FeRAM, aiming for further capacity increases and eventual use in a wide range of applications, including the main memory of mobile phones, mobile consumer products, and cache memory applications in products such as mobile PCs and SSDs.