Micron, Intel speed up flash memory
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Breaking the speed barrier of traditional flash memory, Intel and Micron Thursday announced a new flash memory architecture that increases the data transfer rates in consumer electronics by cutting the bottlenecks affecting conventional NAND flash memory.IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, has developed an 8Gb SLC (single-level cell) high-speed NAND chip which can reach read speeds up to 200MBps and write speeds of up to 100MBps, which could mean faster data transfer between devices like solid-state drives and video cards.&quot;With the popularity of digital video cameras and video-on-demand services, high speed NAND can enable a high-definition movie to be transferred five times faster than conventional NAND,&quot; said Kirstin Bordner, a spokeswoman for Micron.Conventional NAND flash memory from Micron and other players currently transfer data at read rates of 40MBps, with write rates of about 20MBps.The speed improvements resulted from changes made to the NAND architecture and improvements in the read-write circuitry, Bordner said.This chip&#39;s architecture achieves the speed defined in the ONFI (Open NAND Flash Interface) 2.0 specification, according to Micron. Micron was one of the founders of the ONFI Working Group in 2006, and other member companies include Hynix Semiconductor, Intel, Phison Electronics, Sony and STMicroelectronics.Micron is now sampling the high-speed NAND component, with mass production expected to commence in the second half of 2008, the company said.Products based on the ONFI 2.0 specification have been under development and were expected, said Joseph Unsworth, a principal analyst at Gartner.&quot;It wasn&#39;t anything that wasn&#39;t expected. We knew that it was coming out,&quot; Unsworth said.The technology could see an immediate future for use in video and high-end photography devices that require flash memory with quick transfer speeds and reliable data retention, Unsworth said. However, it will be priced at a premium and only multimedia enthusiasts looking for high-performance flash memory would be willing buyers, Unsworth said.As prices stabilize, it will reach mainstream devices like MP3 players and digital cameras, but that could be a long time away, he said.The new flash technology from Micron and Intel could also face competition from Samsung and Toshiba, the world&#39;s top flash vendors, who combined represent 60 percent of products supplied in the NAND flash market. The two companies last year signed an agreement to share specifications to develop faster and more robust NAND interfaces, Unsworth said.While both factions will ultimately deliver high-performance flash technology to consumers, they need to unite under one banner to ease the development of high-speed flash technology. The market is split in half, and it needs one standard voice to simplify the development of flash memory for manufacturers, Unsworth said.
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Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, updated its line of Centrino notebook computer chips on Wednesday with higher speeds and improved multimedia features, a move the company hopes will further propel one of its fastest-growing businesses.
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Flash-beater less than a year away? Intel could begin punching out Flash-busting phase-change memory chips by the end of the year, the processor giant has announced. Its customers could get sample 128Mb chips as early as Q1 2008, it added.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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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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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) plans to develop flash memory chips that blend the best characteristics of the two dominant flash memory architectures, the company announced.
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Users running Vista can supposedly use flash memory sticks to improve boot-up times and boost the start-up speed of their most important software.
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The company plans to present a paper this week outlining a new type of memory that could help boost processor performance.
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A new type of flash memory that will speed access to data stored on memory cards and mobile devices has received the support of several major phone and memory vendors.
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Intel and STMicroelectronics have doubled the density of their new phase-change memory chips, which could replace flash memory in the future.
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Samsung unveils chip that can be used to create 64GB flash memory cards.
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Digital photographers rejoice; SanDisk announced this week 12-gigabyte and 16-gigabyte CompactFlash cards that fall under its Extreme III lineup. The new additions are the highest capacity memory cards on the market, offering a minimum read and write speed of 20MB per second.
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Entire updated chip line to be unveiled, sources say. Newest top-line Itanium 2 boosts high-speed cache memory from 6MB to 9MB.
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Samsung has begun shipping samples of a new 8GB NAND flash chip, which could be integrated into phones to eliminate the need for a separate memory slot. This would allow for smaller devices, the company says.
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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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Toshiba and SanDisk will build a new state-of-the-art flash memory chip factory together starting in 2009, and will share the output from it, the companies announced Tuesday.Separately, Toshiba announced it will begin construction of two more chip factories of its own at the same time. One of the plants will be for NAND flash memory, while the second will be for other semiconductor products.The three factories will make 300-millimeter (12-inch) wafers, which can cost up to $3.6 billion each to build and equip with the latest technology. The companies did not announce the size of their investments.All three will be built in Japan. No site in Japan has yet been determined for the joint Toshiba/SanDisk factory, while the two Toshiba-only factories will be built in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, and in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture.Toshiba and SanDisk are just two players in a competitive NAND flash memory market. Other manufacturers include South Korea&#39;s Samsung Electronics; Japan&#39;s Elpida Memories; Taiwan&#39;s Powerchip Semiconductor, and a company jointly created by Micron and Intel of the U.S., IM Flash Technologies.The new factories will help Toshiba cement its number one ranking among NAND flash memory makers, said Wayne Chen, NAND flash analyst at DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online clearing house for the chips. Samsung is Toshiba&#39;s fiercest rival in NAND.The global memory chip industry is currently suffering from a production glut that has sent the prices of some memory chips down below their production costs. The glut seems set to continue, as a number of manufacturers either have new factories under construction or have announced plans for new production lines over the past several months.Toshiba&#39;s factory announcement could further depress the NAND flash market psychologically because traders may believe the glut will continue due to more factory construction, said Chen. But output from the factories won&#39;t hit the market for years, he pointed out.By targeting construction for 2009, Toshiba is signalling confidence that demand for flash memory, and NAND flash in particular, will rise to end the current glut. Production at the Toshiba-SanDisk plant will not start until 2010, according to their memorandum of understanding. The two Toshiba factories are also targeting production for 2010.The good news for users is that the massive investments will keep the price of NAND flash memory down, which should lead to larger storage capacities in digital cameras, digital music players and other consumer devices.NAND flash memory has grown in popularity over the past several years due to its ability to store songs, pictures and other data when power is shut off, as well as for its reliability in consumer devices such as Apple iPods and the iPhone. NAND manufacturers are targeting SSDs (solid-state disks) as another major product area of the future, to replace HDDs (hard disk drives). SSDs use less power than HDDs, an important difference in small devices, and are more reliable because they contain no moving parts.
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Intel has doubled the capacity of phase-change memory, a likely replacement for flash.