Vision - July/August 2008 - (Page 15)

Intel-Micron NAND Device Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. have launched the first sub-40nm NAND flash device. The Intel-Micron team has rolled out 34nm, 32 Gbit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash. Previously, the leading-edge NAND device from Intel and Micron was a 50nm part. This process technology was jointly developed by IM Flash Technologies LLC, Intel and Micron’s joint NAND venture. A single 32 Gbit chip could store more than 2,000 digital photos or hold as many as 1,000 songs on an MP3 player, according to the companies. creating new applications where none existed before. With small form factor (SFF) hard drives driven to the margins in MP3 players and phones, the next target is the largest HDD market of them all: laptops and desktop computers. With NAND prices coming down more than 50 percent per year, it is only a matter of time before those HDDs are booted out by solid state drives (SSDs). Hard drives can’t compete with NAND on performance, power consumption, ruggedness and ease-of-design. Other large potential markets for NAND include a revamping of the entire computer memory subsystem, displacing HDD and maybe some DRAM, server storage based on RAIF (redundant arrays of independent flash) instead of RAID disk farms. These all depend on the potential for NAND, compared to storage alternatives, and whether NAND performance can be maintained at suitable levels as costs and prices are driven down. DRAM vs. NAND: A Decade’s Price Trends $/MB 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 CAGR DRAM $0.97 0.22 0.22 0.17 0.17 0.11 0.096 0.057 <0.030 ~-32.0% NAND Flash $1.35 0.43 0.25 0.21 0.10 0.05 0.021 0.012 <0.008 ~-50.0% Source: Denali Software Technology Roadmap Despite large gains in productivity and price reduction for NAND Flash, the potential will continue to be strong for the next five to six years. By 2012, the processes will have shrunk from 60nm down to sub-30nm (a 4x productivity improvement). For some applications, bits stored per NAND cell will have grown from just under an average of 2 bits in 2007 to a significant fraction which will have 4 bits per cell in 2012 (another 2x improvement). This year’s transition from ~60nm processing in 2007 to about 45nm processing in 2008 will be followed by moves to 3Xnm processing in 2009—all relatively proven today. After that it gets blurry, but NAND vendors are working on technologies in the 25nm range, which translates into lower cost. Trouble Ahead… Keeping Up But here is where something of a collision is going to take place, which is one of the more opaque areas of NAND’s future develwww.ce.org opment. Each of those technical advances to get the cost and price down, brings with it a degradation of performance and places an increased burden on the NAND Flash controller, to ensure data integrity on the system bus and conformance to industry specs and standards. It’s a fact that NAND pushes the litho to a greater extent than any other product, which means significant parts of the NAND array can sometimes be less than perfect. No matter, the controller monitors the array, makes bad bits right through error check and correcting (ECC) logic, levels the wear across the array so no cell is read or written too many times (endurance), and identifies and avoids bad blocks of the raw NAND array (bad block management). Also, unlike other memories, NAND products exhibit a lack of standards and uniformity among vendors. What standards there are, change and morph from month to month, and are beholden to as many unique roadmaps as there are NAND players—about six today, but growing. The combination of the fast adoption and short product cycle time characteristic of the consumer market, the high potential for new and different NAND Flash appli- cations, and the fast pace of change in the core NAND technology, make it imperative for system designers to remain informed on today’s NAND and controller technology status and what is the likely next turn in the road. This is tough for designers and would-be NAND Flash users since historically, these functions have come from different brains in different companies, with different purposes. The explosive growth of the NAND Flash market has brought with it a rise in the number and sophistication of NAND Flash controller expertise and providers. Some of these are focused on simpler controllers; while some are looking far down the road to 2011, when the demands will be higher once 45 nm and 3X nm processing, and x3 and x4 cells, are in volume production, and more demanding high-end applications are established. This will put additional pressure on controller complexity to achieve system cost-performance optimization. Some companies are enlisting the support of focused third-party experts where skills are insufficient. The largest potential for NAND Flash market growth and usage may lie in the consumer space, with the iPod, digital still cameras and camcorders at the leading edge. With the consumer market, manufacturers will need as much help and information as possible to navigate the range of opportunities. The consumer market has hundreds of competitors, thousands of products, many of which sell in the tens or hundreds of millions of units per year. It is chaotic and churning, backed-up by a rapidly-growing, affluent middle class. Low price points are essential as well as rapid response time to the changing tastes of consumers. Ease of design is a necessity to get these new and innovative NAND Flash-based products in the market in time for the holidays. • July/August 2008 15 http://www.ce.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Vision - July/August 2008

Vision - July/August 2008 Contents Shapiro's Spectrum In This Issue The Economist C4 Trends Visionary Embracing Disrupting Technology Vaulting Ahead with Your Brand International Risk Stop Boomerang Products CEA Newsline Tech Speak Tech Policy Going Global Eye on Business Market Insider Just the Stats

Vision - July/August 2008

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