"It's a radically new technology"!!!!!

"It's a radically new technology," says Michael Kozicki, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Arizona, whose group is one of several working on a version of the new memory. "If it really works as well as everybody thinks it could, it could genuinely revolutionize the memory and storage industry."

A new memory technology, which is under development at the University of Arizona as well as Companies such as IBM and Sony can create thumb drives or Digital camera memory card that stores a terabyte of information-more then what the hard drives today do.
Programmable Metallaization Cell or Nano-ionic memory is one of a new generation of experimental technologies that are bidding to replace hard drives, the nonvolatile "flash" memory used in portable electronics, and the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) in personal computers. Before the practical usage of ionic memory was a bit too slow, but recent demonstrations of the materials structured at nanolevel happens to yield a faster ionic-memory hs changed the scenario. The easy-to-make state of art technology can be made from the materials used in the computer chips and microprocesors, as demonstrated by a recently published work of Arizona group. This will help the manufacutrers to integrate their existing technoloiges, thus no extra retoling, hence rendering them happy.
Ionic memories and Flash memmories
One more attraction of these memories is they use lower voltage thus consuming as little as a thousandth of amount of energy that a flash memory today consumes. In thory even the storage density of these memories (ionic memories)are much higher then todays technologies.
WORKING
The new storage technologies are used unlike the Flash memory tecnology where in which the information were stored in form of electrical charges. So smaller the memory cell that holds the bits of information, lesser the charge it holds,lesser is its reliability. In case of new technology the information are stored by rearranging atoms to form stable, and potentially extremely small, memory cells. What's more, each cell could potentially store multiple bits of information, and the cells can be layered on top of each other, increasing the memory's storage density to the point that it might rival that of the densest form of memory today: hard drives.

"Each memory cell consists of a solid electrolyte sandwiched between two metal electrodes. The electrolyte is a glasslike material that contains metal ions. Ordinarily, the electrolyte resists the flow of electrons. But when a voltage is applied to the electrodes, electrons bind to the metal ions, forming metal atoms that cluster together. These atoms form a virus-sized filament that bridges the electrodes, providing a path along which electrical current can flow. Reversing the voltage causes the wire to "dissolve," Kozicki says. The highly resistive state of the electrolyte and the other, low-resistance, state can be used to represent zeroes and ones. Because the metal filament stays in place until it's erased, nano-ionic memory is nonvolatile, meaning that it doesn't require energy to hold on to information, just to read it or write it"