Category: NAND Flash

Hynix and Spansion Join Forces

Spansion and SK Hynix AllianceSK Hynix and Spansion have announced a strategic NAND alliance under which Hynix will serve as a foundry for low-density SLC NAND chips made for Spansion using Hynix’ advanced processing nodes.

These products, aimed at the embedded market, should serve to strengthen Spansion in a market in which the company thrives. In fact,  Spansion expressed this very well in their press release, citing: “Spansion’s recognized customer support and commitment for longevity of supply, which is highly valued in the embedded market, where Spansion has established relationships.”

The new chips will be manufactured in “4x, 3x, and 2xnm” process technologies.

The companies have also agreed to cross-license their patent portfolios.

You may be asking yourself: “What does Hynix Continue reading “Hynix and Spansion Join Forces”

Remembering Core Memory

Ryszard Milewicz' photo of Core MemoryNostalgia buffs who lived through computing in the 1970s will enjoy some magnificent photos shared in a blog post by Ryszard Milewicz.  These photos give three views of a ferrite core memory plane.  The photo from this blog is a part of one of Mr. Milewicz’ close-up photos.

For those who were not exposed to core memory, this technology was based upon an approach in which every individual bit of a computer’s memory was a tiny donut made of compressed iron powder (“Ferrite”) that had to be hand strung with copper wire into a plane of bits.

A co-worker of The Memory Guy once had a high-speed core memory array that he used as Continue reading “Remembering Core Memory”

Intel Sells NAND Assets

IMFT's Manassas Fab, one of Two Sold to MicronToday Intel divested itself of a portion of the assets of IMFT, the joint venture NAND flash manufacturing arm it shares with Micron Technology.  This is an effort by Intel to groom the business to better suit Intel’s evolving vision of its role in the NAND flash business.

Objective Analysis issued an Alert to our clients giving the “What, When, Why, and Where” of this deal.  The Alert can be downloaded for free from the Objective Analysis Reports page.

Inside SanDisk’s & Toshiba’s New 128Gb NAND Chip

The Toshiba/SanDisk 128Gb NAND Flash ChipOne memory chip was so important that it was presented three times at this week’s International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and that was the Toshiba/SanDisk 128Gb NAND flash.  This chip was shown by Eli Harari in Monday’s keynote, then was featured twice in the Wednesday afternoon Nonvolatile Memories session – once by Toshiba and once by SanDisk.

The NAND chip, measuring 170.6mm², is said by both companies to be the densest NAND available.  Compared to the Intel/Micron 64Gb 20nm NAND at 118mm², the device gives twice the bits in a 45% larger die area, so the companies’ claim rings true, since the only other NAND makers: Samsung and Hynix, have processes that fall far behind at 27nm and 26nm respectively.

Continue reading “Inside SanDisk’s & Toshiba’s New 128Gb NAND Chip”

Harari Delivers Inspiring Keynote at ISSCC

Eli Harari Delivers ISSCC KeynoteThe annual International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is a gathering in which the brightest minds in semiconductors come to meet and share the results of their recent research and development efforts.  This year the four keynotes at the opening plenary centered on a “Green” outlook, through Storage, Control, Computing, and Energy.

Naturally, as “The Memory Guy,” I focused all of my attention upon the storage keynote, given by SanDisk’s recently-retired CEO Eli Harari.  Some of the more interesting points I came away with were: Continue reading “Harari Delivers Inspiring Keynote at ISSCC”

NAND SSD Performance to Decline over Time

Chart from the Grupp, Davis, Swanson paper showing latency increases with capacityA few articles at Computerworld,  Tom’s Hardware, and The Verge were recently passed my way.  These reported on a paper presented at last week’s USENIX conference that predicted how NAND flash’s future performance declines would impact tomorrow’s SSDs.

The paper found that SSD performance is likely to decrease over time as SSDs increase in capacity.  The report postulates that SSDs of the future: “may be too slow and unreliable to be competitive against disks of similar cost in enterprise applications.”

Sadly, the Tom’s Hardware and Verge articles focused more on one of the assumptions behind the paper Continue reading “NAND SSD Performance to Decline over Time”

New NAND Player: Macronix

Macronix NAND FlashMacronix, a company known for its leadership in mask ROMs and low-density NOR flash has just entered the NAND flash market.  This adds a new player to a very small pool of competitors: Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, Hynix, Intel, and Micron.

The company’s first NAND products are SLC chips of two densities: 512Mb and 1Gb.  Compare this to the offerings of the market’s other participants which range up to 256Gb.  Spot price tracker InSpectrum doesn’t even track pricing of densities below 4Gb!

There still seems to be a good market for these low-density parts: According to WSTS  Continue reading “New NAND Player: Macronix”

Micron CEO Killed in Plane Crash

Micron CEO Steve AppletonToday Micron CEO Steve Appleton was killed in an airplane accident.  Objective Analysis has issued an alert to our clients and subscribers giving details of the wreck, Appleton’s contributions to the company, and some thoughts on the company’s succession.  The Alert can be viewed by visiting the Objective Analysis Reports page.

Most of all my thoughts and sympathies go to Appleton’s family and his former co-workers, all of whom are mourning his death.  Although we realize that Mr. Appleton will be missed, but we know that Micron will continue to follow the path set up by Appleton’s predecessor, Micron founder Jerry Parkinson, to maintain its position as one of the leading memory chip suppliers.

Micron, Intel, Introduce 128Gb NAND Chip

IMFT 20nm NAND Flash DieMicron Technology and Intel announced today (6 December, 2011) that the two companies are sampling a 128 gigabit (that’s 16 gigabytes) NAND flash chip manufactured by the company’s IMFT joint venture.

This is a doubling of the capacity of the 64Gb chip the companies announced in April, but they assure us that the size of the die hasn’t doubled, and the accompanying photo supports this.  Intel tells us that the die will fit into standard BGA and TSOP packages. Continue reading “Micron, Intel, Introduce 128Gb NAND Chip”

Top Ten Trends for NAND Flash

Flash Memory SummitDuring the Flash Memory Summit in August three panelists were asked to tell what they thought would be the top ten trends for NAND flash in 2012.

The panelists were:

  • Troy Winslow, director of product and channel marketing for the Intel NAND group
  • Radoslav Danilak, SandForce founder and now CEO of StorCloud
  • Me

Here are mine:

  1. Enterprise SSDs will be used in all data centers
  2. There is still a lot of growth in NAND
  3. Controllers will get more sophisticated
  4. System software will be designed for NAND first
  5. Tablet PCs will morph into newer devices
  6. Not everyone can be a successful SSD supplier
  7. NOR has a long future in code storage
  8. NAND in PCs is a threat to DRAM, not HDDs
  9. The death of flash is not imminent
  10. SSDs in PCs will lose out to NAND + HDD

Over ten future posts I will elaborate on these.  As I do I will add hot links to the list above to guide readers to these predictions.  If any of the hot links are inactive, come back later and check again.

Many are detailed in reports on the Objective Analysis Reports page.