Flash memory

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: August 17, 2011.

Imagine if your memory worked only while you were awake. Every morning when you got up, your mind would be completely blank! You'd have to relearn everything you ever knew before you could do anything. It sounds like a nightmare, but it's exactly the problem computers have. Ordinary computer chips "forget" everything (lose their entire contents) when the power is switched off. Large personal computers get around this by having powerful magnetic memories called hard drives, which can remember things whether the power is on or off. But smaller, more portable devices, such as digital cameras and MP3 players, need smaller and more portable memories. They use special chips called flash memories to store information permanently. Flash memories are clever—but rather complex too. How exactly do they work?

Photo: A typical secure digital (SD) card from a digital camera. Inside, there's a flash memory chip. How does it work? Read on!

How computers store information

Computers are electronic machines that process information in digital format. Instead of understanding words and numbers, as people do, they change those words and numbers into strings of zeros and ones called binary (sometimes referred to as "binary code"). Inside a computer, a single letter "A" is stored as seven binary numbers: 1000001. In fact, all the basic characters on your keyboard (the letters A-Z in upper and lower case, the numbers 0-9, and the symbols) can be represented with different combinations of just eight binary numbers. A question mark (?) is stored as 111111, a number 7 as 110111, and a left bracket ([) as 1011011. Virtually all computers know how to represent information with this "code," because it's an agreed, worldwide standard. It's called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).

Computers can represent information with patterns of zeros and ones, but how exactly is the information stored inside their memory chips? It helps to think of a slightly different example. Suppose you're standing some distance away, I want to send a message to you, and I have only eight flags with which to do it. I can set the flags up in a line and then send each letter of the message to you by raising and lowering a different pattern of flags. If we both understand the ASCII code, sending information is easy. If I raise a flag, you can assume I mean a number 1, and if I leave a flag down, you can assume I mean a number 0. So if I show you this pattern:

You can figure out that I am sending you the code 110111 and signaling the character "7."

What does this have to do with memory? It shows that you can store, or represent, a character like "7" with something like a flag that can be in two places, either up or down. A computer memory is effectively a giant box of billions and billions of flags, each of which can be either up or down. They're not really flags, though—they are microscopic switches called transistors that can be either on or off. It takes eight switches to store a character like A, 7, or [. It takes one transistor to store each binary digit (which is called a bit). In most computers, eight of these bits are collectively called a byte. So when you hear people say a computer has so many megabytes of memory, it means it can store roughly that many million characters of information (mega means million; giga means thousand million or billion).

What is flash memory?

Ordinary transistors are electronic switches turned on or off by electricity—and that's both their strength and their weakness. It's a strength, because it means a computer can store information simply by passing patterns of electricity through its memory circuits. But it's a weakness too, because as soon as the power is turned off, all the transistors revert to their original states—and the computer loses all the information it has stored. It's like a giant attack of electronic amnesia!

Memory that "forgets" when the power goes off is called Random Access Memory (RAM). There is another kind of memory called Read-Only Memory (ROM) that doesn't suffer from this problem. ROM chips are pre-stored with information when they are manufactured, so they don't "forget" what they know when the power is switched on and off. However, the information they store is there permanently: they can never be rewritten again. In practice, a computer uses a mixture of different kinds of memory for different purposes. The things it needs to remember all the time—like what to do when you first switch it on—are stored on ROM chips. When you're working on your computer and it needs temporary memory for processing things, it uses RAM chips; it doesn't matter that this information is lost later. Information you want a computer to remember indefinitely is stored on its hard drive. It takes longer to read and write information from a hard drive than from memory chips, so hard drives are not generally used as temporary memory. In gadgets like digital cameras and small MP3 players, flash memory is used instead of a hard drive. It has certain things in common with both RAM and ROM. Like ROM, it remembers information when the power is off; like RAM, it can be erased and rewritten more or less as many times as you like.

Photo: A typical USB memory stick—and the flash memory chip you'll find inside if you take it apart (the large black rectangle on the right).

How flash memory works—the simple explanation

Photo: Turn a digital camera's flash memory card over and you can see the electrical contacts that let the camera connect to the memory chip inside the protective plastic case.

Flash works using an entirely different kind of transistor that stays switched on (or switched off) even when the power is turned off. A normal transistor has three connections (wires that control it) called the source, drain, and gate. Think of a transistor as a pipe through which electricity can flow as though it's water. One end of the pipe (where the water flows in) is called the source—think of that as a tap or faucet. The other end of the pipe is called the drain—where the water drains out and flows away. In between the source and drain, blocking the pipe, there's a gate. When the gate is closed, the pipe is shut off, no electricity can flow and the transistor is off. In this state, the transistor stores a zero. When the gate is opened, electricity flows, the transistor is on, and it stores a one. But when the power is turned off, the transistor switches off too. When you switch the power back on, the transistor is still off, and since you can't know whether it was on or off before the power was removed, you can see why we say it "forgets" any information it stores.

A flash transistor is different because it has a second gate above the first one. When the gate opens, some electricity leaks up the first gate and stays there, in between the first gate and the second one, recording a number one. Even if the power is turned off, the electricity is still there between the two gates. That's how the transistor stores its information whether the power is on or off. The information can be erased by making the "trapped electricity" drain back down again.

How flash memory works—a more complex explanation

That's a very glossed over, highly simplified explanation of something that's extremely complex. If you want more detail, it helps if you read our article about transistors first, especially the bit at the bottom about MOSFETs—and then read on.

The transistors in flash memory are like MOSFETs only they have two gates on top instead of one. This is what a flash transistor looks like inside. You can see it's an n-p-n sandwich with two gates on top, one called a control gate and one called a floating gate. The two gates are separated by oxide layers through which current cannot normally pass:

In this state, the transistor is switched off—and effectively storing a zero. How do we switch it on? Both the source and the drain regions are rich in electrons (because they're made of n-type silicon), but electrons cannot flow from source to drain because of the electron deficient, p-type material between them. But if we apply a positive voltage to the transistor's two contacts, called the bitline and the wordline, electrons get pulled in a rush from source to drain. A few also manage to wriggle through the oxide layer by a process called tunneling and get stuck on the floating gate:

The presence of electrons on the floating gate is how a flash transistor stores a one. The electrons will stay there indefinitely, even when the positive voltages are removed and whether there is power supplied to the circuit or not. The electrons can be flushed out by putting a negative voltage on the wordline—which repels the electrons back the way they came, clearing the floating gate and making the transistor store a zero again.

Not an easy process to understand, but that's how flash memory works its magic!

Further reading

On this website

• Analog and digital technology
• Computers
• Computer memory (RAM, ROM, etc)
• Electronics
• Hard drives
• Transistors

Books

• Nonvolatile Memory Technologies with Emphasis on Flash: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Using Flash Memory Devices by Joe Brewer and Manzur Gill (eds). John Wiley and Sons, 2008. Covers all aspects of flash memory chips, including how they're made, how they work, and their various applications.
• Flash memories by Paulo Cappelletti et al (eds). Springer, 1999.
• Nonvolatile Semiconductor Memory Technology: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and to Using NVSM Devices by William D. Brown and Joe E. Brewer (eds). IEEE Press, 1998.

Articles

• Tiny chips flash memory advance: BBC News, 23 October 2007. How Samsung has developed bigger flash memory chips.
• IBM races to make hi-tech memory: BBC News, 10 April 2008. A new type of "racetrack" memory could make both hard drives and flash memory obsolete.
• The dark side of the flash drive by Mark Ward. BBC News, 6 January 2009. How flash drives can spread viruses and worms.