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Samsung Develops 16Gb Flash Memory
nofrance writes "As promised earlier this year, Samsung has unveiled the world's first 16-gigabit flash memory chip. These chips, when combined in a 16x16 configurations, will allow 32 GigaByte flash cards. Using 50-nanometer manufacturing technology, these chips will be in production by the second half of 2006, with Samsung promising that their 32Gb team will impress next year." From the article: "According to the company, the cell size of the fingernail-sized flash chip has been reduced about 25 percent from that of the 60 nm 8 Gbit NAND: The new 50 nm flash memory contains cells that measure 0.00625 square microns per bit. The 16 Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors, Samsung said. "
Woah, that's a relief. I was afraid that I might be buying a device with billions of non-functional or even disfunctional transistors.
Just a note...
Flash is not perfect. It is typical for a small percentage of bits to be bad right off of the line. All of the devices contain error correction circuitry in order to compensate for bad bits. There are actually many more than 16.4 billion transistors on board. Many of them will be marked as bad, however.
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Yes, but individual memory chips often do not come rated in bytes but in bits and are configured in parallel to complete the byte. Hence "16x16 config" making 32GB.
Err, it is Gb. The individual chips are rated in Gigabits, and only the final 16 chip products in gigabytes.
Thus the 16 Gb chip is 2GB and when you have 16 of those you get, you guessed it, 32GB.
East Coast Brewers
Next, the 2GB has Toshiba Flash Memory Soldered to the board, whereas the 4GB has a daughterboard with 2x2GB Samsung chips. Therefore, it is possible that someone will reelase an upgrade to the 4GB Nano at some point in the future, but Apple may well have disabled support in the (closed) Nano sofware for flash support above 4GB in the current generation.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
(a) Do a cost analysis. Even if they shrink the gatelength to 25 nm (which will not happen because FLASH memories WILL not work at 25 nm gate lenght, regular transistors will), you will be still be limited to say 100 GBit. Yield is another issue which will drive cost. Debugging such large memory arrays is NOT trivial.
(b) Reading mechanism for FLASH memories is different from Harddisks. Larger the memory arrays, slower it becomes. Make arrays smaller ? You will have lot of peripheral overhead which will drive your cost up. Why is peripheral hard to make ? Because peripherals are made in regular CMOS technology as compared to FLASH technology - integrating them together is a pin in the ass. This is one place which requires more improvement, the memory controller on the FLASH chips is still slow (even if access time from the individual cell is fast).
(c) Will 25 nm FLASH be any faster ? Not necessarily. The gate length scales, but interconnect capacitance doesn't. Smaller transistors will have smaller parasitic capacitance but they may not be necessrily able to drive the long bit/word lines. Solution : Make individual cells bigger. What do you lose ? Your memory becomes bigger.
In short there is a reason why magnetic HDD will stay. Yes there are applications where 10-20GB is enough, but not everywhere. That is why digital MP3s are swept by FLASH based drives. And don't forget that FLASH drives have rated endurance of 100,000 write/erase. Do you want such a thing for your laptop ? probably not.