From The Register:

American boffins say they have made a significant step towards new chip technologies which could lead to faster, more durable non-volatile memory in place of RAM - and so to "instant-on" computing without boot-ups or hard disks.

The new research comes in the area of ferroelectrics, materials used today in so-called FeRAM or FRAM* - Ferroelectric Random Access Memory. FeRAM is a type of non-volatile memory used in smart cards and some portable devices. Compared to Flash, it offers many more read/write cycles before failure, much faster writing and lower power consumption.

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