Intel-Micron Joint Venture Develops 25nm NAND

Ninjakicks writes "IM Flash Technologies is a joint venture between Intel and Micron that is targeted for producing NAND flash memory. With a focus on R&D, IMFT has doubled NAND density approximately every 18 months. Tomorrow IMFT will announce the launch of their 25 nanometer NAND technology — a major advancement in the semiconductor industry. Intel and Micron can now lay claim to the smallest production ready-semiconductor process technology in the world. IMFT took members of the press on a tour of the new 25nm fab and it's an interesting view into this bleeding-edge manufacturing process."

Comments

Great News

[DJRumpy]

This is sorely needed to bring down costs for SSD's. The price and capacities available are coming down at a disappointingly slow pace.

Re:Great News

[BikeHelmet]

Those JMicron drives were absolutely horrible - 4KiB of SRAM cache, later doubled to 8KiB? Even Intel's lowest end SSDs have 256KiB, plus another 32MiB of RAM for caching the locations of free spots to write files.

Oh, btw - the cache has to be SRAM so that if the power goes out, it can write the files when it comes back on. SSDs absolutely must have a RAM cache so that they can efficiently locate places to write files, or they will stall while the controller tries to locate one. That's why the low end controllers perform so horribly in random write.

But now even the worst controllers aren't too bad. If I remember right JMicron's newest low-end controller has 128KiB of cache, and there are cheap Intel knockoff SSDs coming out that perform decently. (same controller, but less RAM cache and less space) If what you want is blazing fast loadtimes in games, they aren't bad options, but they're still slower than a fast HDD and have way less space.

Re:Cheap SSDs in my lifetime?

[BitZtream]

SSD's aren't going to be cheap soon, they have enough advantages over rust that they'll be an overpriced alternative until we stop using rust completely, which is still some time off.

You'll probably never buy a new 300G SSD for 200. You might buy one of a much larger size for $200 because by the time it happens we'll be using MUCH larger drives.

Double patterning has limits.

[viking80]

in the olden days, xx nm really meant feature size. With Intel and other fabs pressing mfg to half the size every 2 years, it seems mfg has gotten quite creative in their definition of feature size. Latest feature size is a fraction of the wavelength of the light used for patterning, and to achieve it, double and sometimes triple patterning is used. That is basically multiple exposures with slight offsets. The result migh be called 25nm but might really be 50nm, and edge sharpness when you are at 1/4lambda is so suspect that you really have to add some margins here and there, and some features dont really lend themselves to double and triple patterning, so you really have a mix including 50nm process for these.

Kind of like a marketing gimmic, just here it is engineering selling it as 25nm to their own marketing departmens.

Re:Double patterning has limits.

[Anonymous Coward]

The practice of optically shrinking an existing die without redesign/relayout is known as half-node stepping. If you read the analysis of these 25 nm parts over at Anandtech you will see that this is clearly not a half-node step. These parts are running charge trap memory cells whereas the previous generation used floating gate cells. Personally, I'll take the increased storage density any way I can get it.

8GB per chip

[physburn]

That not bad storage per chip. Now they need to be able to pack 16 of them into a standard flash stick, for 128GB flash sticks. I'll bet they top out at 64GB per stick though. Flash memory is obeying Moore's law and doubling every 1.5 years, Hard Disks aren't growing as quickly any more, so Flash is catching up, all the same, it will probably be 2020 before Flash drives match hard drives for cost.

---

Storage Feed @ Feed Distiller

Re:8GB per chip

[Courageous]

Withstanding recently trends in the flash market pointing to a slow down of the very fast price drops that have been happening, flash will beat 15K drives on price within 2 years or so. SATA is 6+ years. That may as well be an eternity in technology time. All bets are off. By then, one of the platter manufacturers could pull a density rabbit out of the hat.

Re:No sir, I don't like it.

[KillShill]

Wintel duopoly mean anything to you?

Inte£ was an abusive monopolist long before most people think. Starting back in the late 80's.

They are always treated with kid gloves but M$oft gets no quarter....

It always makes me chuckle when some Linux noob quotes "M$" but running on an Inte£ cpu/video.

Re:Cheap SSDs in my lifetime?

[TheRaven64]

To add another data point to that, I paid £30 for a 128KB flash SSD back around 1994. I'm not sure what the exchange rate was back then, but I'd imagine it was around $50, so that makes it $409,600/GB. That means that the price per GB for flash halved just under 16 times between 1994 and 2007. They've been doubling in capacity per $ more or roughly annually for the as long as they've existed.