Researchers show off low power NAND chips

RESEARCHERS HAVE MANAGED to lower the power consumption of solid state drives (SSD) and enable write speeds of up to 9.5GB per second.

The Japanese boffins managed to lower the "drive voltage" of a NAND flash down to a mere one volt, decreasing the power consumption some 86 per cent over the current state of the art. The researchers claim that by using its technique, write speeds can hit 9.5GB/sec and data can be written to 100 or more chips in parallel.

Putting the one volt figure into perspective, typical floating gate NAND consumes up to 20 volts while ferroelectric NAND is more frugal, required just six volts. The research team managed to get its ferroelectric NAND to operate at one volt by using an insulating film and a metal gate, and this supposedly helps to reduce the drive voltage without needing to increase the steps in the "charge pump circuit".

The challenge with lowering the voltage is that the resultant "disturb problems" can cause data to be written to the wrong cell. The researchers overcame this by developing a write method that turns off two adjacent cells.

All of this is unlikely to see the light of day for some time, as the researchers announced their findings just this week at a research conference. That's not such a bad thing, given that neither Serial ATA (SATA) or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) come close to handling such high throughput.

This suggests that efficient power consumption is the key for the next generation of SSDs. µ