Carbon nanotube memory could be a panacea to all existing memory issues, start-up Nantero said, because it was cheap and did not lose its contents if turned off.

It’s faster than SRAM, it should be cheap and it doesn’t lose its contents when switched off. It should have an almost unlimited life, it should eventually be denser than DRAM, needs less power than DRAM and is resistant to radiation.

Nantero CEO Greg Schmergel claims carbon nanotube memory could be made with conventional CMOS manufacturing, keeping costs low. PCs using it could have an instant-on capability, no more lengthy boot time. Servers could have the speed of SRAM without the cost. Devices using flash could have greatly increased capacity for much lower cost.