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World's Thinnest Flash Memory Cell Unveiled
qorkfiend writes "Measuring a scant 20 nanometers across, Infineon AG's new nonvolatile flash memory cell could lead to 32 gigabit flash chips within the next few years. The cell contains a unique structure with a fin for the transistor to avoid nano-scale physical effects and uses 90% less electrons than today's memory to store data."
Wow, now there might be a practical inexpensive method for solid state servers.
Cool, just in time for a flash based ipod.
One can carry both their MP3 AND pron collection.
This one guy I know can finally leave the house. I'll tell him.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
90% fewer electrons? Does this mean less resiliency/redundancy in the chip - how vulnerable is this to quantum effects - or simple radiation?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
90% less current and since power is
I-squared R
that REALLY cuts the power dissapation which his the brick wall most silicon vendors now approach?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
"The cell contains a unique structure with a fin for the transistor to avoid nano-scale physical effects and uses 90% less electrons than today's memory to store data."
First our cars had fins, now our memory cells. What next? Fins on our computers?
How about replacing a hard drive with flash chips for ultra-compact PCs? I know a lot of devices use this and some people boot linux off usb flash keys, but what about a built-in flash HD interface?
...it can currently only store '1's. '0's are still too wide to fit.
Perhaps, we should always have a 3 year moratorium on the sale of any new technology to a Chinese company. After 3 years, the technology will be dated, and the Western company can proceed to sell the technology to the Chinese.
Can the transister technology used in the flash memory also be used to help reduce the problems occuring when developing CPUs? Do anyone of you /. people know about this?
Since there is 90% less electrons to move, then there would be 90% less current. Power is I^2R, so (.9I)^2R = 0.81P
Sounds very good for portable devices, although I doubt the power consumption of flash cards was that significant (compared to an LCD with a backlite).
Although, my pen drive does get pretty warm when I'm doing enough reading/writing to it, so maybe there will be a significant benefit.
They say 32 gigabit, not gigabyte. So if you divide 32 by 8, that makes for 4 gigabytes. At least, that's the way I understand bit-to-byte conversion.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
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several of the infineon execs have just started their http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4064301.stmpri son terms.
on the inside the only thing that counts is who you are married to!
--- blackironprison, where ignorance is bliss....
"From the Infineon Site "
So does that make it a photo-cell?
I wouldn't worry too much.
From what I understand, dense flash storage like this would become corrupted in seconds when subjected to the harsh environment of space, despite the sheilding that these flash memory cells have.
Of course, I could be wrong, but am pretty sure that this new tech isn't nearly hardened enough to survive space.
If there is 90% less current, there is a 99% saving in Power, not 19%. The new current is 0.1I, so the new power is (0.1 I)^2 R = 0.01 I^2R
I'm not sure that 90% less electrons immediately leads to 90% less current, though. Everything else being equal, this is true, but perhaps other factors have changed as well.
1GB flash drives are already common, add 3 18-month periods to double 3 times over and we'll be at 8GB=32Gbits.
Unless this hits the market significantly sooner than mid-2009, it will have competition.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"the new development would make nonvolatile memory chips with a capacity of 32 Gigabit possible within a few years. That is eight times the capacity of what is currently available in the market."
Did CIOL mean Gigabyte? 32/8=4 Gbytes, 4GB cards have been on the market for a while.
So now we're counting electrons? How long before we start complaining about "electron" bloat. This appears to be the first device to address that. Enough of these massive, slow moving electrons. It's time we start looking into the pure energy components of an atom. Then we won't need these giant boxes we call computers to contain and control all those electrons.
What?
For "raw flash" a filesystem designed with wear distribution in mind is JFFS2.
And yeah, I concur with tmpfs for /tmp. I'd make it default for all distros.
The Raven
become corrupted in seconds when subjected to the harsh environment of space, despite the sheilding that these flash memory cells have.
So, how thick does the Pb shielding have to be to protect nanoscale electronics?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Still some way to go before it's thinner than an EA wage packet, then.
nbiar
A flashdrive is made up of cells. So while conventional flashdrives will be 32Gbits, then new ones will be many times that.
Don't forget, Christmas is coming, and I check my list twice!
is 4 294 967 296 bytes or about 4.3GB on a flash. Really good for photocameras, MP3 players and temporary backups.
You can't handle the truth.
Does Linus count? He's from Finland.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Why does such a large chunk of americia insist on seeing the spread of technology and prosperity as a threat? You can't stop progress.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
mo-ron? "Could care less" means "it would be possible for me to care less". Therefore you care slightly more than if you say "couldn't care less". Furthermore, caring slightly more than not caring means that you care (even if just a little bit).
So there.
Glad to know we're conserving these rare puppies.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Ba-dum! Csssh...
fewer
Heard any good sigs lately?
... electrons are always positive!
Bruce
use some form of RAID-type setup where data is written to multiple flash cards according to some pattern optimized to minimize the chances of failures having an impact before you could replace the failed card(s). (You would not want to use the current RAID techniques because they would cause near-equal wear on all the cards, thus incresing the likelihood of simultaneous failures).
HAND.
Here at Infineon we've elminiated 90% of this bloat and passed the savings on to you!
Infineon: More byte, Less bloat.
Are FinFETs the first example of a vertical feature on a chip?
That get's me thinking, could we make a chip with smaller chip pieces that are attached vertically to the main chip. Like a Mobo with cards plugged in, but at the IC level. Maybe if the "cards" are smaller ICs also that have a keyed pattern of notches on one end that match a set of holes on the main IC, then just shaking a mix of these subunits over the main IC would get them installed. Anyone in the chip biz know if this could work?
To: Engineering
Subject: The Fin
Great work guys! Just one thing. Can you add a second fin and reshape the cell a bit? Give it a bit of a retro look? The CEO has a '59 'deVille he's especially proud of and he's been bugging us to death ever since someone in IT showed him how to actually use e-mail to include it in our ad campaigns so that he can write it off. I think we can kill 2 birds with 1 stone here, if you get my drift. Besides, your stuff will look really fast this way. And if you can make them pink, that would be a nice extra touch.
Thanks! And btw, can you finish it by the end of this week? We got advertising spots to buy, and ourselves to justify. Review season is just around the corner. Doesn't matter if it won't actually come out until 2009.
---Marketing Droid #451
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What I think many have failed to see is that they are talking about an 8 fold increase PER CHIP. Most devices will have many chips. So what their press release says in laymens terms is, "Take the largest flash drive currently available and multiple by 8."
Not only that but it will do it with less power. Unfortunately I don't think it's enough to make up for all the electron sucking video cards starting to hit the market right now. :(
Wow, this thing uses 90% fewer electrons! This will help prevent a shortage of electrons in the future.
While everyone is complaining about math issues and how gbit and gbyte relate i think the real point is RW speed, current flash chips have horrible RW speeds my 1 GB flash card takes almost 1/2 hor to download. so it would take 16 hours to get my data (photos) of a 32 Gbyt card that would make it compleatly impractical. i would prefere to see a card that has at least CDROM read transfer speeds. that would be something worth buying.
you can't run a computer with these chips as secondary memory because the cells still die out after 10,000 or so writes to them. When will they develop everlasting flash memory chips?
Which finger? Hows is 4 gig a stretch when a 2 gig SD card smaller than my nail is available now?
For everyone who doesn't know, four or so Infineon execs were just convicted of price fixing (the age-old German custom). Their arschen are going to jail! Finally the capitalists get punished for their asocial mischief :)
Well, it's probably 90% less electrons per cell. But given that they're probably going to be packing in quite a few more cells (around 4 times as many, if the storage size from the headline is correct), the power consumption probably won't decrease all that much.
3906250 kilobytes, dividing the 4 billion bytes by 1024 (making a true kilobyte) so about 3.9 gigs, plus a couple of old clunky circa 1985 hard drives.
To replace moore's law for the modern age, we will use "corporate execs law", where "The number of transistors will double while I'm serving my term for cooking the books and stealing money."
so they're stored as '1's
Flash has a *much* lower number of r/w cycles before it dies than a HD does..
Now, if you use huge D/S-ram from swap and tmp, and the HD for mostly readonly.. Might not be a bad idea... ( much as a PDA does now )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Flashram degrades i.e. you have a limited number of writes.
Use standard ram with a battery backup so that it doesn't loose its' state.
Having to recharge every month or two shouldn't be a problem and we all keep regular backups don't we?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Now there's a marketting phrase! Can we expect IC manufacturers to start publishing an "electron count" for their products? How many ways can that be spun into deceptive marketing .... "Well, Brand X claims they're using fewer electrons than we are, but they're not telling you about the anicillary effects that consume 27% more electrons than the Acme Electron Lite Reduced Electron Count (REC) model. The fact is, our revolutionary REC technology represents a quantum leap in facilitated innovation..."
"The Internet is made of cats."
You're logic is flawed. it isn't .9*.9 = .81 It is (.1I)^2R or 1 hundreth the original power consumtion... Also as someone posted above there is dwarfed compared to the other usage of current needed.
This is one of those witty signatures that you'll remember.
What a dick.
Jeez, how retro. Everybody know that these days, to make something go faster you have to give it a rad paint-job, wicked rims and a set of neons underneath!
You must think in Russian.
-d
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
How big is an electron? In nanometers? Does it get bigger when it's travelling in a wire? Or in a "cathode ray"? How close can they get in spatial distance before appreciable electronic repulsion forces them apart? How many joules are required to accelerate one from "rest" (eg, charging a capacitor) to their speed at 1.5V in 1E-9s? Or, to prove I'm not completely lazy (or physics illiterate), how about the equations in those units, and I'll do the math myself?
--
make install -not war
I want an MP3 player that has a small compartment like a battery compartment where I can plug in a standard USB memory stick. Then, I can have gigs of music in a very small amount of space. It will also mean that as memory sizes grow and prices drop, the player is cheaply and easily upgraded with widely availible memory. Today 1 or 2 gigs...Next year it could have 8 or 16 gig. Plus any amount you have in your pocket.
20nm across means 1cm^2 can hold 250B(illion) cells, each 1 bit. That's 32GB(yte) chips in a cm^2. I have a 1GB SD chip in my Treo's SDIO slot, which cost $67 today. A 32GB chip is only 5.7 times denser (in each planar dimension). In the other direction, a 32GB SD chip (similarly less dense in the same 32/5.7x scale) today costs $10, which includes the overhead of the rest of the package.
I'm not so jaded that I think 20nm isn't so small. These numbers really scream how tiny a scale in which we're already producing engineering commodities. I just think that we'll see an increase in Flash density, driven more by the exploding market and R&D money than by physical and engineering limits. 3D memory array packages are long overdue: how about taking that 1GB chip, and arraying its 200nm cells within a 32Kx32Kx0.5K array, a millimeter-thick sandwich of cells and address bus layers, for a 0.5TB chip? 4 of those in an SD package would make a great 2TB cell the size of a quarter-dollar coin. By the time the packaging is engineered, the tech discussed in this thread will have shrunk cell size by at worst half, so 8x0.5TB layered chips can not only offer 4TB, but the address busses can offer a hypercube (or higher-order) topology, for parallel accesses.
Then we can get really fancy. Dedicate 1% of the Flash cells among the busses to FPGA logic cells in 100-cell clusters. That tiny parallel machine is now potentially the fastest supercomputer on the planet. That path to a "hypernanocomputer" is purely evolutionary, in terms of IC fabrication. If that were say, Intel, IBM or Fujitsu's roadmap, we could be there within 5 years, maybe 2-3 years. C'mon, someone over at Infineon get to work and really impress us.
--
make install -not war
Strange, I though that's exactly what nuclear arms control was all about.
You think non-proliferation is doomed to fail?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Nuclear arms control doesn't stop progress. Many more countries have obtained nuclear arms. It stops their usage.
My UID is prime is yours?
Quite true, and evidence that arms control is not working effectively. It IS SUPPOSED TO prevent the spread of nuclear capabilities. That I even have to debate this simple fact is quite ridiculous.
No, it does nothing at all to stop their use... That is left to many, many other programs.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
For the few who have real data in /var/ , a better idea is to have a /fs/var.tar.gz which is untarred into /var on boot up. (rc.local).
Some people even tar it back on shutdownQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
If you really believe that electricity is a quantum phenomenon then you should be saying "fewer electrons". Saying "less electrons" is probably a sign of obsolete analog thinking. "Less electricity" is better.
Sure it's doomed. The NPT allows any nation to
withdraw at will; so it's like a door lock: it just
keeps honest people honest. If you want nuclear
weapons, and can afford them, you will have them in
short order. And nowadays, a couple of million $US
is quite enough to afford them. I've known several
people personally who could go nuclear, if they had
sufficient motivation. I'm truly stunned and amazed
that no one has nuked D.C. or Moscow yet.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
"less electrons ... leads to ... less current"
unless the electrons go around twice!
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
unless the electrons go around twice... as fast!
If you noticed, I said that *everything else being equal*, there would be a 90% drop in current. Current is proportional to the rate of electron flow. If there are half as many electrons, but with greater mobility, you haven't decreased the current by a factor of two.
And besides, what I was really trying to point out was that the OP was completely wrong with his 81%-less-power. 90% less currrent implies that the new current is only a tenth of the old current, not 90% of it. One would think that on Slashdot, posters would be able to handle basic arithmetic. (Or if not, at least the mods would.)