Storage technologies and issues for military suppliers

Fairchild Defense, a leader in providing state-of-the-art solid-state storage systems to the US and foreign militaries, periodically surveys storage technologies. This paper provides a review of current, near-term and future non-volatile storage technologies, to include: flash E/sup 2/PROM; rotating magnetic media; FRAM; MRAM; holographic storage; optical molecular storage; probe-base molecular storage; molecular MRAM. The paper summarizes each of these technologies, the capabilities of each, and provides a development status/road map for their application in military equipment. Particular emphasis is given to applicability of each storage technology for use in the rugged military environment and discussing the advantages, disadvantages, and issues in using each. Finally, the paper postulates the development of a 1 Terabyte military storage system.