Intel & Micron Show 34-nm, 32-Gbit Flash Memory Chip

Lucas123 writes "IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, announced it has developed a 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip that is expected to enable the production of cheaper solid-state drives with twice the storage capacity of today's products. The 34-nanometer, multi-level chip is smaller than Intel's latest CPUs. Samples will be available in June with production by the end of the year."

Comments

Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had lots of flash memory go bad lately, including a brand name 1Gb SD card.

What about the reliability? It's great that they can manufacture on a 32nm line, but given that this is a new process, what reliability testing has it undergone?

I'll go with the proven technology, thank you very much, especially for something where the 'smaller is not necessarilly better' physics side of things kick in.

Re:Reliability

[Darkness404]

HDs though, go bad quickly. For me not a single flash chip has ever catastrophically failed like many HDs I have had. Also, do you really want to carry a hard drive in your cell phone? And flash chips are much, much, faster then most hard drives. And really, HD speeds are one of the biggest bottlenecks in high-speed computers, RAM is cheap enough to get 1 GB for less then $50, CPUs are multi-core, Linux has a fast and usable OS, USB is fast enough for most devices, so all we need is faster HD read/writes and we have a much faster computer, problem is, the way to speed up a HD is only via either A) RAID 0 which costs reliability or B) increase RPMs which add price and chances are, decrease reliability over time. So as of now, the only way to get large amounts of space, without spending a fortune and having it be reliable (no moving parts) and fast is with Flash chips and SSDs.

Re:Reliability

[Gavagai80]

And for me, I've never had a hard drive fail in my life (16 years of hard drives, sometimes several at once, and with a CPU dying in that time). Personal experience doesn't mean anything.

Re:Reliability

[cheater512]

Correct me if I'm wrong but arent hard drives faster than flash when it comes to raw speed?
Flash obviously has better seek of course.

Oh and as a guy with a 4 drive RAID 5 array which can hit 200mb/s, hard drive speeds are not a big bottleneck.

And hard drives will always beat flash when it comes to raw data storage.
My raid array gives me a terrabyte of usable space with redundancy for a few hundred bucks (back 2 years).
Flash today would cost thousands for the same amount of storage.

Re:The Price of Flash

[matt21811]

Anyone can check the spot price for flash anytime by looking at this site:

http://www.dramexchange.com/

Scroll down to the flash section.
SLC is the good stuff used in the big fast SSD's you get from people like Apple.
MLC is the slower, less long lasting, stuff commonly used in thumb drives.
$2.08 for a Gigabyte in MLC
$6.70 for a Gigabyte of SLC

If you want to know the long term price improvement rate for flash, you can join that site for $1000 a year or if you want the cheap version, I've been tracking retail flash (MLC) prices for 9 years at my site here:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.html

Memory is almost always ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory is almost always ahead of the curve when it comes to silicon manufacturing. These were the guys who were at 55nm when the processor industry was temporarily stuck at 90nm.

All kinds of memory can use smaller processes because the logic is much simpler; you're basically laying the same thing out over and over and over again on a die. For the same exact reason, most companies use SRAMs to test their processes before moving up to higher level logic like processors.

A Bit Of Confusion With Flash Sizes

[rsmith-mac]

Since we're on the subject of flash memory, I find this article confuses me a tad bit. I was reading an article yesterday that mentioned that the current iPhone has room for a single flash chip, which means the current 16GB variety has a 128Gbit chip in it. But then TFA implies that 32Gb chips are as big as flash memory comes right now, which leaves me at an impasse. How does a device like the iPhone fit 128Gbit as a single chip if chips only come up to 32Gb in size?

Re:Costs

[Kjella]

Memory cells are much simpler to lay out with the same over and over again and much more resistant to flaws in the manufacfuring process by switching off bad cells. Intel says it's on track for doing 32nm processors in 2009 which I guess means RAM/flash early in 2009. Still, yes this is technology 6mo+ away I think. Maybe they surprise us, new generations of flash seems to have been coming all over the place. Or maybe smarter, cheaper controllers or whatever, I see a lot of room for improvement elsewhere.

Re:The Price of Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we also get an increase in R/W speeds as the chip shrinks.

If so how much? Potential speed increase over magnetic disk could accelerate the payback for IO bound database applications.

Currently magnetic disks have such effective caches that they are able to nullify a lot of the speed advantages of SSD. In fact some benchmarks I've read still show magnetic disks leading speedwise in realistic application benchmarks.

But this could also be partially due to new unoptimized drivers for such devices.

always just over the next hill

[MilesNaismith]

Yeah I've been hearing SSD would replace spinning disks for a long time now. Still hasn't happened. Even early this year SanDisk was touting it's next products which I still do not see on NewEgg. When they've actually shipped a FAST 32-gig for under $100 get back to me.

Re:Costs

[Iron Condor]

As the industry moves to 32nm and beyond, the sharply escalating costs of both IC product development and fab equipment may combine to slow down the historic chip cost reduction trendline.

Celebration! 2008 marks the 25th anniversary of this claim being made at a die-shrink -- or at least 1983 is the first time I heard it. People were talking about the 1u (1000nm) "holy grail" and how it would likely never happen because it wouldn't be worth the cost...

Re:Typo ?

[LarsG]

16GB thumb drives don't exist... the biggest I've seen is 4GB... Where you live, middle of Amazon rainforest? 16GB thumbdrives been round pretty long time. 32GB is the largest that is currently available in the retail channel. Even eensy teensy size of your fingernail microSDHC cards reached 8GB a while ago.

As for SSD having higher cost; more complicated interface logic (pci, sata/pata, etc), they tend to use SLC instead of MLC flash, they tend to be in a parallel or interleaved organization, some have proper on-board logic for wear leveling (compared to the "smartmedia" format that thumbdrives tend to use), etc..