In today’s digital world, the exponential growth of data usage presents significant challenges. Every year, data centres handle over a zettabyte of traffic— equivalent to one billion 1-terabyte drives. This increase in data activity consumes more electricity than The Netherlands and Belgium combined, whilst in Ireland data centres already account for 21% of total electricity consumption.
Moreover, information and communication technologies (ICT) contribute over 2% of global carbon emissions, similar to the contribution from the aviation industry. If current trends continue, ICT could account for up to 20% of global electricity consumption by 2030. This growing demand for digital infrastructure underscores the need for energy-efficient solutions, particularly in memory technology.
ULTRARAM™ emerges as a breakthrough innovation. It is a non-volatile computer memory that combines the advantages of DRAM, which is the working memory of a computer, and Flash, the storage memory that is in solid-state drives (SSDs) and USB thumb drives. Between them, they represent 95% of the >$100bn per year memory market.
ULTRARAM™ can store data for more than 1,000 years while maintaining integrity even in the presence of material defects or environmental variations such as temperature fluctuations or light exposure and its use of quantum-mechanical resonant tunnelling ensures fast, energy-efficient performance, making it a memory with a remarkable set of properties.
This memory technology, invented by Professor Manus Hayne, could be used in a wide range of applications, however, within the scope of the ATTRACT project, it focuses on two key areas: Space technology, where energy efficiency is crucial, but cost is less important. It could be an early adopter, and the idea is to test ULTRARAM™’s performance under extreme conditions and investigate its radiation hardness. Data centres, which are among the largest ICT consumers of energy, and ULTRARAM™ could have significant environmental benefits, for instance, via its integration into the infrastructure of British Telecom (BT), one of the project partners, currently responsible for consuming nearly 1% of UK electricity.
“By exploiting quantum physics, ULTRARAM™ has achieved something that was previously considered unobtainable: the ability to quickly and easily change data that is nevertheless very robustly stored. This means it has the properties of a so-called ‘universal memory’, giving it the potential to be used in a range of technologies and sectors, opening up the prospect of huge economic, environmental and societal benefits”, mentioned Manus Hayne, project coordinator and Professor at Lancaster University.
A new spinout: Quinas Technology
In 2023, Lancaster University launched Quinas Technology, a spinout company to commercialize ULTRARAM™, with support from the Innovate UK ICURe Programme, designed to help researchers explore the commercial application and potential of UK research.
After this achievement, Quinas and the Lancaster University research team have won several awards based on their performance and commercial potential: “Most Innovative Startup” – Flash Memory Summit 2023 (Silicon Valley), “University Research Group of the Year” – Elektra Awards 2023, “Smart Data & AI” – IC Taiwan Grand Challenge 2024, among others.
Quinas exhibited in the 2024 Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) conference, where Professor Hayne also delivered a presentation on the advancements in fabrication processes and the potential applications of this emerging technology, and very recently the research team participated with a stand at the UK National Quantum Technologies Showcase 2024.
ULTRARAM™’s main applications
The main markets of this R&D&I project are space, cryo/quantum computing, defence, IoT and data centres, and while the ambition is to compete with DRAM, the research team has now also identified in-memory computing for AI as an application that would take advantage of ULTRARAM™’s remarkable properties:
- Ultralow energy consumption.
- A very robust data storage.
- High program/erase cycling endurance.
- Operation at high and/or lowest temperatures.
ULTRARAM™ is coordinated by Lancaster University with contributions from its Physics Department, in collaboration with BT, Integrity Scientific (a small spinout company from Warwick University), Wellspring (formerly IP Pragmatics, a small consultancy company) and the University of Wollongong in Australia.
Here you can watch a video of the ULTRARAM™ project:
For additional information about the project, visit here.
