After all these years, we have yet to get to the point where we can instantly turn on a PC or restore an active Windows session. Recovery from sleep or hibernation can take anywhere from a fraction of a second to what feels like an eternity, depending on the system. One reason for this is the PC's dependence on DRAM and how it works. But there is good news. Researchers at Lancaster University in the UK have developed a type of non-volatile memory.

They call it UK III-V memory. Nonvolatile memory is not new, but the key differentiator here is speed: UK III-V memory is fast enough to replace DRAM and consumes a fraction of the power.

To understand why this is important, it is important to know what DRAM is and how it benefits the PC DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) is memory that plugs into a DIMM slot on the motherboard. It is often referred to simply as RAM. In a gaming PC, 16 GB of RAM is the sweet spot.

RAM is incredibly fast compared to other forms of memory, including flash-based storage found in the fastest consumer SSDs. But that performance comes at a price: RAM is volatile and does not retain data when not powered; shutting down a PC will flash any data that was loaded into RAM, leaving it to boot up clean.

You can avoid shutting down the system by putting the PC to sleep. This is essentially a low-power mode that continues to supply a small amount of power to the RAM, preserving the contents of the RAM; when the PC returns from sleep, the open documents and everything else remain intact. Hibernation is similar to this, but writes the PC's current state to the hard drive so it can be shut down, then restores everything in a similar (albeit slower) fashion.

Both can be used as an alternative to shutting down the PC (as well as leaving it on all the time), but they are not perfect. Sleep mode has bugs. I have pulled my hair out for years because sometimes my PC would not boot properly from sleep mode.

This is what makes UK III-V memory so interesting. Because it is non-volatile memory, the contents of the PC are retained even when the power is turned off. Equally important, it is fast enough to replace current DRAMs.

Electronics Weekly magazine (discovered by our friends at Toms Hardware) has some details on this technology. The gist of it is that UK III-V memory is non-volatile and very power efficient. It consumes about 1 percent of the energy that current DRAM and NAND flash memory require to write data.

On the technology side, UK III-V memory uses floating gates to store memory, similar to flash. However, instead of using oxide isolation, indium arsenide and aluminum antimony materials are used to provide "near perfect" isolation between the floating and control gates.

If this makes any sense to you, please read this article for the technical details. Otherwise, those of you can sit tight and hope that this will lead to a true replacement for DRAM.