Toshiba today announced the prototype of a new FeRAM —Ferroelectric Random Access Memory—that redefines industry benchmarks for density and operating speed. The new Toshiba 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. In developing the new FeRAM, Toshiba broke its own record of 32-megabit density and 200-megabit data transfers, pushing performance to eight times faster than the transfer rate and density of the previous records and the fastest speed of any non-volatile RAM.

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. Full details of the new FeRAM will be presented this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference 2009 (ISSCC2009) in San Francisco, USA.