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Samsung Begins Mass Production of Industry's First 3D NAND Flash
Lucas123 writes "Samsung has announced it is mass producing the industry's first three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory that breaks through current planar NAND scaling limits, offering gains in both density and non-volatile memory performance. The first iteration of the V-NAND is a 24-layer, 128Gbit chip that will eventually be used in embedded flash and solid-state drive applications, Samsung said. It provides 2 to 10 times higher reliability and twice the write performance of conventional 10nm-class floating gate NAND flash memory. Initial device capacities will range from 128GB to 1TB, 'depending on customer demand.' 'In the future, they could go considerably higher than that,' said Steve Weinger, director of NAND Marketing for Samsung Semiconductor. Samsung's process uses cell structure based on 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology and vertical interconnect process technology to link the 3D cell array. By applying the latter technologies, Samsung's 3D V-NAND can provide over twice the scaling of current 20nm-class planar NAND flash."
128 gigabits per Chip and 128 gigabytes per device.
It exists? It means that NAND can live another generation or two longer as a viable technology before the competitors (e.g., RRAM) are ready to step in.
If you lack the reading comprension skills and computer knowledge to correct someone, it makes you look twice as dumb as you think you are making the object of your correction look. Virtually no device is deployed with only one of these chips. Many are deployed in arrays of 8-32 or more. So if you have 8 bits, you have 1 byte. Consquently, if you have 8 chips of 128,000,000,000 bits you have 128,000,000,000 bytes. (Don't get into the pedantic Gibi versus Giga)
US President Barrack Obama has been quoted saying "since this NAND type RAM is such basic knowledge and essential for producing smartphones, Samsung should provide it for free to US companies, starting with Apple since they are already violating their precious design IP."
I'd say this is up there with perpendicular recording, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording for hard disks
As the summary suggests it enables higher densities and improved transfer rates as we bump up against space and power limits based on physical limitations of process engineering. The fact is that 10nm is bumping head long into some fundamental laws of physics and the ability to scale storage to the point where it reaches the densities of spinning platters is still a factor or two away is a huge market challenge to move Solid State Data Storage off the specialty and into the mainsteam standard. If we can get 4TB of flash storage in a 3.5" form factor for $250 bucks, it kills the spinning disk. This gets us two or three steps closer.
And unlike the RRAM story, it's an announcement that it's being placed in mass production, not some lab where it was assembled by hand and "still 5-10 years away," like nearly every storage story we ever see.
If it's got enough depth it can live up to the hype since the main cost for these things is mm squared area on a wafer. That zone refined silicon is stupidly expensive in terms of energy and thus heating costs.
chip size is different from device capacities(multiple chips, in device sizes from x to xx), one is talking about the other.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You'd think ComputerWorld would know better...
It's not 128 GB (gigabytes), it's 128 Gb (gigabits) of capacity.
"128 gigabit (Gb) density in a single chip..." - Samsung press release
No no no. Please read carefully. The ComputerWorld article says that the final device ("once used to create embedded memory and solid-state drives") can have from 128GB to 1TB of storage. However the article states erroneously "Samsung's new V-NAND offers a 128 bit density in a single chip".
We have, they're called multi-level cells. They improve memory density but at a cost of increased complexity, lower speed, higher susceptibility to noise, higher power consumption, and decreased lifetime. Decimal arithmetic was used on at least one early computer (ENIAC) but binary circuits were found to be much simpler to design and implement. The only modern non-binary digital computer that I'm aware of is the Soviet Setun that used ternary (tri-state) logic.
Accept Eris as your Fnord and personally sate her
"depending on customer demand."
I demand that they stop price fixing SSDs and RAM just because Windows 8 is selling like crap. Once a 500GB SSD is a reasonable price, I'll pick one up and they'll put Seagate and WD out of business completely. What the hell are they waiting for, sitting back and making ridiculous profits in the short term instead?
Oh come on, Apple started this war. Probably not a good idea to go after the company providing so many of your components, but whatever.
I love the guys who come on slashdot to read bleeding edge tech news then complain that it's not a product in the marketplace yet. Cracks me up. You cold post this comment in basically everything on slashdot. You might as well go read engadget.