Chip News Roundup - Did Someone Mention Samsung’s NAND?
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Needless to say, Samsung is not neglecting its NAND flash to focus on PRAM. About the same time it unveiled the PRAM, the company also showed off its first 40 nm chip, a NAND flash memory module for use in memory cards able to store up to 64 GB of data, or about 40 movies. The new chip gives Samsung a 5 nm edge on Intel and keeps it on target to continue fulfilling its promise to double the capacity of NAND flash every 12 months.
There’s real pressure to keep up this pace too. Users want their gadgets to be smaller and do more. Mobile handsets not only take phone calls these days, but also house a camera, digital music player, and various computing features, including the ability to surf the Internet. Storage plays a major role, with users wanting to take their photos, videos, and songs with them wherever they go. (With reference to an old saw, it’s been noted that a picture had better be worth a thousand words; it takes up far more space!). This trend toward small but capable and storage-intensive devices shows every sign of continuing for some time.
That’s fine with Samsung, because the company is ready to shrink its chips right in tune with that trend. It has developed a new design technique, Charge Trap Flash, which will allow it to shrink NAND chip features down to 20 nm eventually. This technique will lead to the production of 256 gigabit chips. Instead of using floating gates, a CTF chip places data temporarily in a holding chamber made of silicon nitride.
Samsung is also finding new uses for its NAND flash. The company is making a hybrid drive, a type of hard drive for laptops that uses NAND flash as a disk cache. Here flash memory can really come into its own, speeding up boot times and reducing power consumption. The chip for the hybrid drives boasts up to 4 GB of NAND flash for a data buffer. You’ll see these pretty soon; Samsung plans to have the chips in mass production sometime in November.
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