New High-Capacity Flash Memory
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Samsung unveils chip that can be used to create 64GB flash memory cards.
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(InfoWorld) - Flash memory and hard-disk drives could face a challenge from a new chip technology, dubbed phase-change memory, being developed by a group of companies led by IBM. The companies on Monday announced the results of their latest research into the technology, which they say will do a better job of storing songs, pictures, and other data on iPods and digital cameras than current flash memory, and could someday replace disk drives. Among the advances, the companies have built a prototype device that runs 500 times faster than today's flash memory while using half as much power to write data to a memory cell, they said. The circuits on the device are much smaller than those on today's flash chips, measuring just 3 by 20 nanometers, and show that, unlike flash, phase-change memory will be suitable for production on the advanced manufacturing techniques targeted for use in 2015, the companies said. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. The progress came partly from the development of a new material to build the memory chips, a germanium alloy to which the researchers added other elements to enhance its properties. The companies have applied for a patent for the material, they said. Besides IBM, the developers include Qimonda, the DRAM spin-off from Infineon Technologies, and Taiwan's Macronix International Co. They plan to discuss their findings at the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineer's 2006 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco later this week. It's the kind of breakthrough that people look forward to in the IT industry, although end users will have to be patient before it finds its way into products. It could take several more years for the technology to be developed sufficiently for use in finished products. Still, phase-change memory appears promising. The chips would be a new type of non-volatile memory, which is memory that can hold its electrical charge -- and its data -- after devices are turned off. Flash is also non-volatile, but phase-change memory can hold its electrical charge better than flash and use it more efficiently, its backers say. Flash also faces a roadblock in the future. As engineers make chip circuits more tiny, the circuits leak more power and ultimately lose their ability to store data after being turned off. The size limit appears to be around 45nm, although it will still be years before the flash industry starts using such tiny production technologies. Phase-change memory can be scaled down to 22nm, or far smaller than flash memory, the researchers developing it say. It also appears able to be more durable than flash, whose memory cells start to break down after 100,000 rewrites. While its prospects appear bright, the technology faces several hurdles. New chip designs must be relatively easy to manufacture, and they need to be cost-effective enough to attract device makers. RambusÂ faced this issue when its chips failed to overtake DRAM as the main memory type for PCs several years ago, despite having the backing of Intel. The problem, some companies said, is that the chips was were too costly to produce -- although Rambus vehemently disagrees with this. IBM has posted photos of the phase-change devices here, and some animation clips here.
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Thumbnail-sized memory card's maximum capacity will be 128MB.
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Western Digital today introduced a new series of portable USB hard drives with capacities as high as 320 GB in a package comparable in size to a Nintendo DS Lite.
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Samsung Electronics is shipping hybrid hard-disk drives that mix conventional magnetic storage with flash memory. The company claims that the system delivers a 70% to 90% cut in power consumption thanks to its ability to use NAND for caching data.
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EMC plans to introduce a line of solid-state drives using flash memory as an option to replace some disk drives in the company&#39;s high-end Symmetrix storage arrays, a company spokesman said Monday.EMC will offer solid-state drives with capacities of 73GB and 146GB, said Abhrajit Bhattacharjee, an EMC spokesman in Singapore. The drives, which will ship this quarter, will only be available as an option with Symmetrix storage arrays, and will not be available with other products, he said.Pricing for the solid-state drives&#160;was not immediately available, but using four 73GB solid-state drives to replace four of the 146GB hard disk drives in a Symmetrix 100-disk array would increase the cost by less than 10 percent compared to a comparable system using only hard disk drives, Bhattacharjee said.Solid-state drives use memory chips instead of magnetic platters to store information. These types of drives are generally faster and consume less power than traditional disk drives, but they are also significantly more expensive.The solid-state drives are aimed at customers willing to pay a premium for the significantly faster response times these drives offer, Bhattacharjee said.EMC plans to use single-cell flash memory in its solid-state drives, which will allow for higher performance but costs more than multicell flash memory.Single-cell flash memory stores one bit of information in each memory cell, while multicell flash memory stores two. The greater density of multicell flash makes it perfect for music players and digital cameras. But multicell flash is significantly slower, making single-cell flash more suitable for high-performance applications such as solid-state drives. Single-cell flash memory is also more durable that multicell flash. Each cell on a multicell flash chip is generally good for 10,000 write/erase cycles, while the cells on single-cell chips can last for 100,000 write/erase cycles. The durability of a flash memory chip can be increased with the use of wear leveling, a technique that writes data equally to all of the memory cells on a chip instead of using the same cells repeatedly.Drives based on magnetic platters are capable of enduring unlimited write/erase cycles, but they have moving parts which can break down. Solid-state drives do not have moving parts.STEC -- the maker of the solid-state drives that EMC plans to offer -- said its solid-state drives, which use wear leveling, last more than 2 million write/erase cycles. There was no indication of how many write/erase cycles the EMC solid-state drives will be capable of sustaining.
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SanDiskÂ® Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) yesterday introduced the worldâs fastest flash memory cards - the SanDisk Extremeâ¢ III line of CompactFlash SDâ¢ and Memory Stick PROâ¢ digital film cards.
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The new industry standard, called Universal Flash Storage, is an attempt to drive data transfer speeds and memory storage capacity up.
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South Korea's Samsung Electronics has said it has developed a chip with enough capacity to store 36,000 high-resolution photographs or 40 movie files.
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70-megabit memory chip with 35-nanometer transistors is due out in 2005
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics is sampling a new type of flash memory device that could make it easier for makers of mobile phones and MP3 players to increase the storage capacity of their products. Samsung's moviNAND devices combine a NAND flash memory chip, an MMC (multimedia card) controller, and some firmware into a component that's small enough to be used in the latest portable electronics products, the company said. Samsung has started shipping samples of 1GB and 2GB moviNAND chips to manufacturers and will begin mass producing them later this month. It plans to introduce 512MB and 4GB capacities by the end of this year, it said. MoviNAND solves allows device makers to include a large amount of flash memory in their products while still using a standard serial interface, the company said. "The significance of the MMC interface is that the complexities of the native NAND interface and management are completely abstracted from the [portable device]," Samsung spokesman John Lucas said via e-mail. In addition, the MMC interface performance better than other standard interfaces because it has an 8-bit wide bus, allowing data to be processed at up to 52MB per second, he said. NAND flash has become popular for its ability to store large amounts of data at relatively low cost and to retain that data when devices are switched off. It's used in memory sticks, memory cards and digital music players such as Apple Computer's iPod. Other NAND makers include Toshiba, Hynix Semiconductor, and IM Flash Technologies. It's one of several recent flash memory advancements from Samsung. On Monday the South Korean companyÂ showed off a 32GB NAND flash memory chipÂ built using an advanced, 40-nanometer manufacturing process.
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Based on Single Level Cell (SLC) flash technology, the Mtron 128GB drive will only make it to market as an OEM product, where it might turn up in the Spring as an expensive option on laptops. The performance of 120MB/sec on writes, and 100MB/sec on reads is way above levels found on older SSD drive designs.
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Aimed at digital cameras, Kingston Technology's new Ultimate CompactFlash cards can read data at 45MB/second, write at 40MB/second.
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And pushes PRAM into the limelight Samsung has developed a 40-nanometer memory device, which it today claimed is the first of its kind.â¦
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A new semiconductor alloy jointly developed by IBM and its partners will spur the development of faster and smaller memory chips. The companies say the advancements would lead to smaller chips than currently possible with flash memory.
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(InfoWorld) - South Korea's Mtron Co. Ltd. is adding to its line-up of already speedy solid-state disk drives with new models that offer faster reading and writing of data. The new drives offer a maximum sustained read speed of 120M Bps (bytes per second) and a maximum write speed of 90M Bps compared to 100M Bps and 80M Bps respectively on current models, said Ahn Ji-young, a spokesman for the company. Mtron is unveiling the new models at the IFA trade show in Berlin this week. The speed jumps are important because they should directly translate to an increase in performance in the system in which they are used. When a computer needs to store or retrieve data there is often a slight delay while the information is transferred to or from the disk. By increasing the speeds the delay is shortened. SSDs are already fast compared to standard hard-disk drives. The drives use flash memory chips in place of a rotating magnetic disk to store data and that brings a significant performance increase. In previous demonstrations PCs running SSDs have been able to boot Windows in about 20 seconds compared to more than 30 seconds for hard-disk drive-based computers. Mtron is planning to begin production of the drives in late September or early October. They will be available in 16G byte, 32G byte and 64G byte capacities and in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors with Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces. The drives are plug-in replacements for existing hard-disk drives. The company offers three families of product: a basic model for consumer applications, a professional model for server applications and an industrial model for harsh environments and military applications. Mtron is planning to introduce a higher capacity 128G byte model in the fourth quarter of this year and at about the same time will introduce a 1.8-inch drive, said Ahn. The smaller drive will debut at 32G bytes and a 64G-byte version should be available in early 2008, he said. Â
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New cards provide more memory for cameras, cell phones and other consumer devices.