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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."
FWIW, another article covering this same press-release noted that most flash costs $2.50/Mbit to manufacture, but this new stuff by Intel costs just under $1/Mbit to manufacture. So the rapid downward spiral of flash storage pricing should continue for at least the short term.
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Because smaller is more energy efficient, which is useful on a number of levels: for one, it saves electricity, and it also means that the chips produce less heat, which lets them run better.
The total cost to develop a chip product -- including all EDA functions as well as maskmaking -- has been nearly doubling each node from 90nm to 65nm to 45nm. Moving on to 32nm is projected to raise costs only ~50% over 45nm, but the absolute numbers are now making design-teams pause to consider their choice of manufacturing node. Kinugawa predicted that neither Japanese fabless nor customers nor IDM-internal designers are prepared to jump to the next node -- such that a "several year gap" will appear between the availability of 32nm node fab capacity and substantial demand! They're kinda jumping the gun with 32nm.
New tech is expected every 2-3 years.
32nm was expected for 2009-2010 and 22nm is expected in 2011-2012
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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.
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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.
More importantly, smaller allows it to fit into smaller devices, meaning larger-capacity USB drives, cellphones, and iPods.
There are two methods that I've seen:
The key is determining how much to add. Having too few won't allow you to hit your yield targets, and adding too many is a waste of area (i.e. money). And as you mentioned, products that are more logic intensive don't benefit from this very much.
Having a tight process with great yield is still the best approach (if you can achieve it), though, because you get the great yield with smaller die.
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?
You can also get 32 GB ones. and 16GB SSDs cost over $200 That is true, for the most part. I would imagine they are made to a higher quality than thumb drives, or they are just overpriced. Probably both. Certainly, they are ridiculously priced compared to hard drives.
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Sure, you're getting 200Mb/s, but you need four drives to do it. A SSD can give you the same performance and reliability as a RAID array in a single drive. Sure, right now, that single drive will cost as much as your entire array, but that situation will improve as manufacturing volumes increase and prices come down.
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