TRIKON Technologies has launched a £3.3 million project to pioneer a breakthrough in computer memory chips.

The Coldra-based company, which employs 210 people, has received extensive funding from the Department of Trade and Industry for the work. The hope is that the firm can put Britain at the forefront of a $18 billion industry.

Memory chips in today's computers have a "volatile memory" meaning they forget everything when the power is switched off.

This is why it takes a PC two to three minutes to warm up: information stored on the hard drive has to be reloaded into the memory chips every time you switch on. And the chips also have to be continuously refreshed which drains the battery in a laptop application.

If the volatile memory chips could be replaced with a non-volatile version PCs would switch on like television sets and laptop batteries would last much longer.

Trikon will be using a nanotechnology process (engineering on a molecular level) involving broad ion beams to build magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) chips.

It's estimated that within four years MRAM devices will account for $3.8billion of the projected $18 billion market for next-generation non-volatile memories.