The hands-down of title of Detroit’s greatest information age innovator has to go the late Stan Ovshinksy.

Imagine your smart phone being so powerful a computer that you will need no laptop or desktop for heavy lifting. You only need screens, home or away, from pad size to your big screen TV. Everything you need to do digitally is delivered wirelessly to them from your pocket rocket.

Such micro power is about to arrive thanks to one of Ovshinsky’s ideas that is coming to fruition.

In the 1960s, Ovshinsky first began exploring the properties of something known as chalcogenide glasses...

The chemistry and physics behind why that is so important is well beyond me, but the result is something called nonvolatile memory that is 500 to 1,000 times faster than current flash and dynamic random access memory [[DRAM), while using half the power.
Intel Corp. [[Nasdaq: INTC) and Micron Technologies Inc. [[Nasdaq: MU) will start commercializing a technology called phase change memory.

Not “a” technology. “The” technology.

“This is the biggest game changer since the invention of the transistor,” Breezy said by phone last week. “Because of this, over the next 10 years, computing will change more than it has since the advent of the computer.”
Read full article at Crain's Detroit Business.