Crossbar, the Santa Clara startup, recently announced a game-changing new memory chip that has the potential to replace flash memory in a number of applications.

Dubbed as Resistive RAM or ReRAM, this postage-sized chip has the ability to store up to a terabyte of data as well as access that data 20 times faster than than the best flash storage available today.

How is this possible?  SiliconANGLE’s Mike Wheatley explains that the ReRAM is composed of simple electrical structure that consists of three-layers of silicon-based material, including top and bottom electrodes, and a switching medium.  The idea is that the voltage flowing across the electrodes creates a filament where the data can be stored. This filament is tiny – just 10nm – and can adjust to shrinking feature sizes. The company claims that its technology will provide ten years of retention and a lifetime of around 10,000 write cycles per cell.

Crossbar believes that ReRAM could give birth to a new wave of consumer, mobile, enterprise and industrial devices.  Because of it vision of the future, Crossbar has received a $25 million round of funding from  Artiman Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Northern Light Venture Capital.

Where’s the business opportunity?

But where does the opportunity lie for ReRAM in this $60 billion a year market?

According to Wikibon Co-founder and CTO David Floyer, the market that ReRAM is entering is a pretty big market and in the last 40 years only two technologies have managed to break through.  These two technologies are DRAM, which was introduced by IBM and have been extensively used in computers since then, and flash which got traction when Steve Jobs made a commitment to put CMOS chips in Apple’s iPod nano product.

“Breaking into a market is incredibly difficult and a lot of things have to be right about it.  It has to have the right characteristic… but it also has to be makeable, it has to compete with the latest improvements in flash technology which are happening all the time, it has to compete with the improvements in DRAM in terms of speed, etc.,” Floyer explains during an appearance on this morning’s Live NewsDesk Show with Kristin Feledy.

“So it’s trying to catch up with a very fast moving trend and the key point that they make is they believe that flash is gonna ran out of steam in five years.  Well, that was said five years ago, that was said five years ago before that.  Yes, it may run out of steam, but there is a lot of money and a lot of imagination and a lot of scientists working on removing the barriers and they’ve been successful so far.

“The other issue is that one of the potential improvements in flash as some of the sub-technologies that are coming out of ReRAM.  They may be able to be applied to flash and again take advantage of some of these characteristics without having to change everything,” Floyer says.

Floyer adds that we can expect ReRam to get off the ground in a minimum of about five years but will probably take longer since there are a lot of testings to be done to make sure that the product is flawless and reliable and can withstand all sorts of environmental factors like flash has been able to.

For more of Floyer’s Breaking Analysis in the future of ReRAM in the industry, check out the NewsDesk video below: