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Planar NAND Development Ends After 26 Years

Posted by timothy on from the dog's-not-that-shaggy dept.

Lucas123 writes: The non-volatile memory used in thumb drives, SSDs, smartphones and any other mobile device today has at last hit an engineering wall. The major developers of planar NAND this week said now that they've reached 15 or 16 nanometer process technology, they no longer expect to shrink their lithography process any further, as the capacity and economic benefits no longer make sense. Toshiba, which produced the first NAND flash chip in 1989, SanDisk, Intel and Micron said they will turn their engineering efforts to 3D flash trap NAND, 3D resistive RAM and other vertically-stacked non-volatile memories that offer a much longer road map. The manufacturers all said they'll continue to produce planar NAND while developing 3D NAND, which has already doubled previous capacities while also offering two to 10 times the erase-writes of previous non-volatile memories and twice the write performance. Intel and Micron are also producing a 3D NAND, based on floating gate, and a ReRAM that the companies say will increase performance and endurance 1,000 time over planar NAND. Toshiba and SanDisk have come out with a 48-layer 3D NAND that could allow them to produce 400GB microSD cards next year.

7 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. IPhone 7 still 32 and 64GB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Despite these advances, IPhone 7's will still be just 32 or 64GB, with a ridiculous upcharge for the 64GB version...

    1. Re:IPhone 7 still 32 and 64GB by sremick · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Apple anti-consumer design of their phones has now infected their desktops and laptops as well. Apple has given the middle-finger to 30+ years of standard personal computer design practice. Want to upgrade anything? Buy a whole new computer. Any part breaks? Buy a whole new computer.

      Any single reason they give for it is utter BS. Anyone who buys into it is a gullible blind sheep. I'm sorry, but I've seen too many companies do exactly what Apple says they can't for me to give an ounce of credibility to their pathetic excuses. Computers smaller and thinner than Apple devices, with removable/upgradable components. Epoxied-in batteries, that are made part of the chassis along with they keyboard? Soldered-in RAM and SSD storage in computers twice as thick as other devices I own where the RAM and SSD are removable (and expandable). Keyboard spill = $360 part + tons of labor. At the end of the day, Apple does it for one reason and one reason alone: it gets more of their brainwashed cult of customers to buy more overpriced shiny devices more frequently.

    2. Re:IPhone 7 still 32 and 64GB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Apple anti-consumer design of their phones has now infected their desktops and laptops as well.

      I think you mean anti-power user. The average Apple consumer is quite happy with the arrangement.

  2. Re:Limits of storage / human perception by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You're making (at least) two assumptions.

    1: The majority of storage space will be spent on multimedia that is to be consumed by humans.
    2: The kinds of multimedia being used will not change.

    1 could easily be violated if it's not humans, but the computer, that's making use of the data. Our AI research hasn't really made any progress towards sentience, but computers are getting damn good at processing large amounts of data and then answering questions about it.

    2 could be violated with increased demand for true 3D media (not in the 3D movies sense, in the 3D videogame sense, in that you have control of the position and angle of the camera). There's certainly a lot of hype around VR headsets, that particular form of entertainment might finally start to take off in the next few years.

  3. Re:Limits of storage / human perception by Smidge204 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Even if space is unlimited and free, transmission will still take time. Data compression isn't going to go away unless someone solves the bandwidth problem too.

    =Smidge=

  4. Re:Device support and partition table by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Except for lack of support on devices other than desktop and laptop computers.

    I think you misunderstood my point. exFat wasn't put on any devices until MS paid to have it baked into some standard. UDF filled the role perfetly at the time exFAT was chosen, despite being superior in every way, royalty free and supported by every major operating system already.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  5. Re:Limits of storage / human perception by jfengel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You can also turn your head and move around. You may not need to keep the entire thing in your field of view all at once. Sometimes you want the big picture, sometimes you want to drill down.

    You can emulate that in software, but there are kinaesthetic senses you can take advantage of. If you're looking at a large map, for example, it's very intuitive to move your face in to read names, and then away to see where that fits into the whole. It's faster and more effective for me to switch from a debugger window on screen B and my running program on screen A.

    I don't know what the limits are; the GP suggested 8K and that sounds about right to me. But I think that assuming a single, fixed head position for the user can be unnecessarily limiting, and miss out on one kind of gesture to enable smoother interaction.