Planar NAND Development Ends After 26 Years

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.

Comments

SDXC patent

[tepples]

I don't know how slow they'll be, but every one of them will incur royalty payments to Microsoft because the SD spec requires all cards larger than 32 GB to be formatted in Microsoft's patented exFAT file system.

Limits of storage / human perception

[Dan East]

I was just thinking to myself how awesome it would be to have a 1 petabyte micro SD card, but then realized, "What could I possibly use that much storage for?" Yes, I know, the supposed "640k is enough for anyone" fallacy. Well, there really is a limit to what a normal human being needs to store. Why aren't MP3 files today 100 times larger than they were 15 years ago? Because the normal human's audio perception cannot tell the difference between a 5 MB MP3 and a 500 MB MP3. So the space required to store 1,000 songs is pretty much the same as 10 years ago, for most people.

In the last few years, we've reached the limits of human perception when it comes to image resolution. The display on my phone and my ultrabook are both so high resolution that I cannot see individual pixels without a magnifying glass. How high of a resolution does a photograph need to be to print it out 8x10 with pixels so small that they cannot be seen? We've already surpassed that resolution a long time ago.

Why don't computer monitors and image formats use 64 bit colors instead of 32 bit color that we've had for 15 years? Because the normal human cannot distinguish shades of color beyond 32 bit RGB.

When everything is in 4k video, why would we need higher resolution (unless people are regularly projecting things on screens as wide as their house)?

The amount of storage we need has already plateaued when it comes to certain kinds of media, and it will soon plateau in the others (video, etc) as well. At that point it's just a matter of quantity. What good would it do me to be able to store 1 million songs, or 1 million pictures on my phone? I certainly cannot produce that many myself, and I cannot even consume them either.

For normal consumers, there will be a limit to the amount of storage we need and thus will pay for. When that occurs, research will slow down as the profit to be gained from selling petabyte of storage vs an exabyte will no longer justify the research. We are quickly reaching the point where speed and longevity are more important than capacity, so I expect, within 5 years, the emphasis will switch from mainly quantity to quality.

Re:Limits of storage / human perception

[digitalPhant0m]

to have a 1 petabyte micro SD card, but then realized, "What could I possibly use that much storage for?"

blah blah blah ..... porn.

Re:Limits of storage / human perception

[jfengel]

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.

Re:Limits of storage / human perception

[paulpach]

I am a game developer.

Indeed many games have color banding, so do many jpeg images. But this has nothing to do with the color depth.

When a game bundles an image, it is normally compressed in a lossy format such as DXT5 or ETC1 (depends on your platform) . These formats are typically much smaller than say a PNG, and are sent compressed to the video card. The video card has hardware that can get a pixel when needed from these images without having to decompress it. This saves a lot of video card memory which can be used for more polygons and whatnot.

These formats like jpeg, do modify the image a little bit if it helps makes them smaller. A somewhat oversimplified explanation is this: suppose there are 5 pixels that are almost the same color, for example: (red, red+1, red-1, red + 2, red +1), the algorithm will change them to be the same color: (red, red, red, red, red), then instead of saving each individual pixel, it will just store: (5 red), which takes a lot less space. A particularly bad effect of this is that gradients end up being not so smooth so you see banding. Reality is a lot more complex than this, but you get the idea.

In addition, when a texture is rendered at a distance, the hardware actually chooses a scaled down version of the image. The farther the texture, the less precision is used until there is only 1 pixel. This is called mipmap. Depending on the algorithm used for blending mipmaps, it can also generate banding.

You could use 128 bit RGBA color depth, and you would still see the same banding due to these optimizations.

Device support and partition table

[tepples]

But seriously, UDF already fills the role perfectly.

Except for lack of support on devices other than desktop and laptop computers. If it is mandatory for SDXC certified devices to use exFAT, a lot of lazy device makers won't test anything else. Besides, some operating systems recognize UDF only on a drive that has a partition table, others only without a partition table. (Source)