Sun and Micron develop single level cell NAND
BOFFINS AT MICRON, along with chums at Sun, have developed a new single-level cell (SLC) enterprise NAND technology that dramatically extends the lifespan of flash-based storage.
Apparently the new gear can manage one million write cycles. This is the highest write/erase cycling capability of any NAND technology available on the market and has the boffins opening the champers.
Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron's memory group, said that the development will enable the use of flash NAND in new applications that were impossible before. Standard SLC and MLC NAND has inherent write/erase cycle limitations.
Shirley expects the technology to revolutionise the enterprise storage hierarchy. It would see uses in a wide range of transaction-intensive applications, including solid state drives and storage systems and disk caching, as well as in networking and industrial applications.
Micron is now sampling its Enterprise NAND in densities up to 32Gb. Volume production is expected in the first quarter of 2009. Micron also plans to introduce both SLC and multi-level cell enterprise versions on its industry-leading 34nm NAND process early next year. µ
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"standard" SLC: 100.000 write cycles
MLC: 10.000 write cycles
unfortunatly SLC will not get cheaper because MLC is cheap and popular
(same as with VA/IPS panels and the cheap and popular TN).
To hell with flash! Where is the non-volatile RAM we were promised years ago? Where is the updated version of my old core memory?
Sorry SOBs are so greedy, cramming memory guaranteed to fail down our throats while proclaming it a major breakthrough! What a scam!
What I want to know is what happens in about 5 or so years when the companies start hitting sizes where the positions of individual atoms matter. Assuming Moore's Law(I'm using the term VERY loosely here) is 9 months for SSDs and 12 months for hard drives, SSDs will really start to shine in about 10 years. But long before that imaginary point comes, they're either going to have to come up with a new way to store bits or things are going to come to a grinding halt.
As smaller and smaller circuit components are built out of fewer and fewer atoms, there is one potential way to extend Moore's Law a bit further: use smaller atoms.
Replace the electrons in an atom with muons, and the orbitals become smaller, so the resulting “atoms” take up less space.
Chemistry might be a bit different, though. Also muons decay with a half-life of a couple of microseconds. Though it'll probably be time to upgrade to the next model by then. :)
Portable storage is not going to have to worry about Moore's law because memristor is going to ensure continued increases in capacities. Applications might be two years away but Flash will stick around until then.
IEEE Spectrum has a good article about it:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6207