Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

Samsung has begun producing a new chip that one day may replace flash memory and that is expected to increase cell phone battery life by more than 20 percent.

Samsung PRAM chip

(Credit: Samsung)

The world's largest maker of memory chips said that it is now manufacturing phase-change random access memory (PRAM) in 512-megabit (Mb) capacities.

Phase change memory has been discussed for decades. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, for instance, wrote an article about the technology that was published in the September 1970 issue of Electronics magazine. And the basic way the technology works hasn't changed. In phase change memory chips, a medium called chalcogenide--the same stuff as used in CD-RW rewritable disks--gets heated up to very high temperatures, the heat changes the physical state, and the two resulting states become the ones and zeros used by computers for data storage.

PRAM has promise because it can read and write data at lower power than conventional flash memory and single bits can be changed to either 1 or 0 without the need to first erase an entire block of cells--a shortcoming of flash.

Phase change memory is also "executable," which is particularly useful in cell phones for handling application code.

"By using PRAM, the battery life of a handset can be extended over 20 percent," Sei-Jin Kim, vice president of the mobile memory planning and enabling group in the Memory Division at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement. "We expect it to become one of our core memory products in the future."

The 512Mb PRAM chip can erase a small memory segment more than 10 times faster than NOR flash memory. In data segments of 5MB, PRAM can erase and rewrite data approximately seven times faster than NOR flash, Samsung said.

The chip is produced using 60-nanometer manufacturing technology, the same process technology used in NOR flash production today. Finer technology nodes will be applied in future generations of PRAM to accelerate wider commercial adoption, Samsung said.

Market researcher Gartner said in a research note published Monday that it is taking a wait-and-see stance. "Samsung said that the PRAM samples it provided to chipset and phone makers have shown much-better performance than NOR flash," Gartner said. "However, before a final judgment can be made, Gartner is waiting for the reactions of...chipset makers and the first commercial product to confirm the practical advantages that PRAM offers."

Gartner continued. "Samsung has also demonstrated that the power consumption of its mobile DRAM + PRAM is 22 percent lower than that of mobile DRAM only. If Samsung can show such power savings and other benefits in final products...the company will find itself in a commanding position in the memory segment for the entire mobile handset industry."

Memory chip makers will offer more sophisticated flash drives for smartphones--technology that will be comparable to the solid-state drives found in laptops today.

The Palm Pre comes with an 8GB flash memory drive: flash drive makers like Micron Technology will market more sophisticated flash drives for future phones.

(Credit: Palm)

Today's flash drives, which typically range up to 32GB in capacity in products like Apple's iPhone, often use relatively unsophisticated techniques for reading and writing data. In general, the technology is not very different from that used in basic cell phones or digital cameras, according to Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron's memory group.

But as smartphones--and possible future tablet devices--become more like personal computing devices and less like basic MP3 players, memory chip makers will begin offering more sophisticated flash memory, said Shirley, in a phone interview.

"In nearly all MP3 players today it's almost exclusively 'raw' NAND. And at some point we anticipate moving more to a managed NAND," Shirley said. NAND is the type of flash memory chip used in all flash cards and solid-state drives.

Managed NAND falls somewhere between very basic flash drives--such as Secure Digital, or SD, cards--and pricey solid-state drives (SSDs) used in laptops and servers. "It's something in between the raw NAND that we've been talking about for cell phones and MP3 players and the full-blown SSD space," Shirley said.

"We believe this will be fairly busy (market) space in 2010," he added.

Solid-state drives used in laptops like the Apple MacBook Air and Dell Adamo get their performance from highly-developed, sophisticated controller chips and firmware, which manage how the data is read and recorded. Though managed NAND wouldn't necessarily reach this level of sophistication, it would begin to approach it.

The iPhone uses raw NAND with a separate controller, according to Gregory Wong, founder and principal analyst at Forward Insights, which does research on flash memory technology.

"They like to have control over the flash and the controller so they can boost performance," he said. "They're very cognizant of differentiating their products. The user experience is what is important to them. Whether it means you can download your music or video very quickly, whether it means you can find the data very quickly--that ties in to how they manage the NAND," he said.

But even Apple is looking for better performance as it looks to continue its very successful strategy of making its products different, according to Wong.

And future Netbooks may also use this kind of flash memory. Netbooks today using Intel Atom processors and the Windows operating system use, almost exclusively, hard disk drives. But a new category of Netbooks dubbed smartbooks--devices that are always on, always connected, and boast all-day battery life--are expected to come to market in 2010 packing flash drives. These small laptops may be candidates for managed NAND.

Updated at 9:10 a.m. PDT: adding analyst comments.

On Tuesday, Intel and Micron Technology announced the development of high-data-capacity flash memory technology for flash cards and USB drives.

Intel-Micron chip will enable high-capacity USB drives

(Credit: Lexar)

And in a related announcement, Intel said Monday that it has validated a fix for its new 34-nanometer X25-M solid-state drive, which is based on similar flash memory technology. The bug affects users who set a BIOS drive password. That update is available here.

The two chipmakers, which partner in the manufacture of flash memory chips, said Tuesday that they have developed NAND flash memory capable of 3 bits per cell based on 34-nanometer technology. This allows greater data density than the standard 2-bits-per-cell technology and will result in high-capacity USB flash drives, according to Micron.

While packing more bits into a cell provides greater data densities, it is not as reliable as flash memory based on more standard technology, according to Kevin Kilbuck, director of NAND marketing at Micron. Therefore, the 3-bits-per-cell chips will be limited initially to flash drives, which don't require the data storage reliability of a solid-state drive, which is used as the primary storage device in laptops and servers.

"The chip is not for all markets," according to Jim Handy of semiconductor market researcher Objective Analysis, writing in a research note published Tuesday about the technology. "The companies explained that they need more experience in production volumes before they will be confident to position it as a chip suitable for the high-write environment of the SSD," he said. Handy is referring to the fact that users of solid-state drives typically record data at a much greater frequency than consumers who, for example, buy flash drives for digital cameras.

But Handy added that he expects the Intel-Micron chip by 2010 to "cause snags for the other vendors in the market: Samsung, and Hynix/Numonyx" and potentially be more profitable than the competition.

Micron is currently sampling the chips and will be in mass production in the fourth quarter.

SanDisk and Toshiba disclosed in February that they had developed 4-bit-per-cell technology, which the two companies said was the highest-capacity flash memory technology in the industry.

Toshiba has begun volume shipments of solid-state drives ranging up to 512GB in size, as these hyper-fast storage options bulk up on capacity.

Drives are also offered in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and are built on a 43-nanometer manufacturing process using multi-level cell (MLC) technology. MLC technology allows drive makers to increase capacity while keeping production costs under control.

All drives come in either a 1.8-inch enclosure, typically used in ultraportable laptops, or a 2.5-inch housing, the standard size for mainstream laptops.

Toshiba said in December that it would begin shipments of a 512GB drive this year. And this drive became available exclusively on Toshiba laptops in May.

SSDs typically offer higher performance--often much higher performance--than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts.

But SSDs are still hobbled by a distinct price disadvantage. Toshiba's own Web site offers vivid proof. A Toshiba Portege R600 laptop is priced at $2,099 with a 160GB hard disk drive. Adding a lower-capacity 128GB SSD hikes the price to $2,499. Add the 512GB option and this goes to $3,499.

Back in December of last year, Toshiba said sample quantities ranged from $220 for the 64GB drive to $1,652 for the 512GB drive--though these prices have likely come down, as the drives are now shipping commercially.

For businesses up-front pricing may be less important. Over the lifespan of an SSD total cost of ownership may be lower, according to Gregory Wong, president, Forward Insights. Potential savings are particularly relevant to business laptop users, said Wong. And Intel recently did some in-house testing that showed that failure rates of SSDs are lower than hard disk drives.

On the performance front, Toshiba said it is using an advanced controller chip that enables a maximum sequential read speed of 230 megabytes per second and maximum sequential write speed of 180 megabytes per second. These read-write speeds are typically many times that of a hard disk drive. Toshiba did not specify random read and write speeds, which are also critical benchmarks for everyday data access.

Intel has recently begun shipping a 160GB solid-state drive that offers improved random write performance. The chipmaker was able to get up to a 2.5X improvement over previous versions of its SSDs.

Toshiba is not alone in announcing commercial shipments of large-capacity SSDs. Micron Technology's Crucial Technology unit has begun selling 256GB drives listed at $599, which beats Toshiba pricing at that capacity.

Note: Intel has found a bug in the new SSDs cited above that affects users who set a BIOS drive password. When disabling or changing the password followed by powering off/on the computer, the SSD becomes inoperable. The root cause has been identified and a fix is under validation. Intel expects to post an end-user firmware update to fix this bug in the coming weeks.

Apple said Tuesday that it has made a $500 million prepayment to Toshiba for flash memory chips and indicated the market is stabilizing.

Apple COO Tim Cook says the flash memory market is stabilizing.

(Credit: Apple)

"The NAND flash market has now begun to stabilize and we expect it to move to a slight demand imbalance," said Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook in Apple's Tuesday earnings conference call. (The call is available as an audio Webcast on Apple's Web site.) The news was reported earlier by Reuters.

"In terms of the Toshiba prebuy, we did a long-term supply agreement with Toshiba, as a part of that, as a part of the terms and conditions, we paid them $500 million," Cook said. "We view flash as a very key component for us because we use it in so many of our products and also we're a reasonable percentage of users of flash on a worldwide basis."

NAND flash is used for data storage in a variety of consumer products including digital media players and smartphones, such as the iPod and iPhone, respectively. For the last two years, flash chipmakers such as Japan-based Toshiba and U.S.-based Micron Technology have been reeling from severely depressed flash memory pricing.

Intel, which makes flash chips jointly with Micron, is also seeing a recovery in pricing. "For the year, it's up over 50 percent," said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, in a phone interview earlier this week. He was speaking about the recovery in flash memory chip prices in the spot market. "That's been very positive for the industry and obviously we have benefited from that. And our business is going very well," he said.

Even with the better spot market pricing for flash memory--which is a boon for manufacturers--this won't necessarily translate into a jump in prices for consumers, according to Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities. "If the question is--will components (flash chips) cost 50 percent more than they did three months ago? Absolutely not," he said.

Intel is introducing new solid-state drives with increased performance as these devices find a more welcome home in Windows 7.

Intel said Tuesday it is moving to a more advanced 34-nanometer manufacturing process for its X series of solid-state drives (SSDs). To date, Intel has built drives on a 50-nanometer process. The more advanced process allows for higher data densities, enabling Intel to pack more data onto the same number of flash chips and reduce cost.

Solid-state drives typically offer better performance--in some cases, dramatically better performance--than hard disk drives. But SSDs cost more per gigabyte than hard drives, limiting their use to performance-sensitive applications such as high-end laptops, gaming PCs, and servers.

(Credit: Intel)

The new price for the 80GB version of the X25-M drive is $225 for quantities up to 1,000 units, a 60 percent reduction from the introduction price of $595 a year ago, Intel said. The 160GB version of the Intel X25-M drive is now $440, down from $945 at introduction.

However, the actual price drop in the market will be lower, Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, said in a phone interview. Intel had already announced an interim price reduction in January, below the original $595 and $945 price tags, he said.

"In the marketplace it will be around a $100 drop on the 80GB drive and almost a $200 drop on the 160GB drive," he said. The X25-M comes in a standard 2.5-inch form factor, which is the size of most hard drives used in laptops.

Winslow also addressed rumors circulating on Monday about higher-capacity drives. Intel will not introduce a 320GB SSD this year, he said. "What we decided to do is split 34-nanometer into a two-step process," he said. The first step will be to cost-reduce existing 80GB and 160GB drives. "And what we'll do later--and it's not even going to be this year but first half of next year--we will introduce, also on 34 nanometer, a performance enhancement and a doubling of the capacity," Winslow said, meaning that larger capacity drives, such as those over 300GB, won't appear until next year.

Back in the day, Netbooks ran Linux and packed solid-state drives. But Windows XP and big hard disk drives have prevailed.

Toshiba's mini NB200 does not offer a solid-state drive option in featured configurations nor Linux

The early Asus Eee PCs--which almost single-handedly created the Netbook market--came with a Linux operating system and small-capacity solid-state "flash" drives ranging from 2GB to 8GB. Early Acer Aspire Netbooks were also offered with Linux and a solid-state drive.

Those devices bore little resemblance to PC laptops. The Eee PC was a tiny, stripped-to-the-bone device that required minimalist hardware to run an efficient Linux OS. (Will a wave of Google Chrome OS-based devices revive the minimalist Netbook next year?)

Fast forward to today: Windows XP rules, with a Netbook-specific Windows 7 on the way. A glance at the Netbook lineups from any top PC maker--including Hewlett-Packard, Acer, and Toshiba--reveals few, if any, Linux offerings and equally few solid-state drive options.

Rather, beefy hardware configurations sporting 160GB hard disk drives and as much as 2GB of memory are the norm.

And the momentum for solid-state drives on mainstream laptops is waning too. A report from market researcher iSuppli says higher prices for flash memory chips may undermine high-capacity SSDs in laptops.

Average pricing for widely used 16-gigabit flash chips rose to $4.10 in the second quarter of 2009, a steep 127.8 percent increase from $1.80 in the fourth quarter of 2008, said Michael Yang, senior analyst for mobile and emerging memories at iSuppli, in a report released Wednesday.

As for Linux, time will tell if Netbooks return to their roots with Google's Android and/or the Chrome OS next year.

Though solid-state drives are in vogue, market forces and technical issues are giving the venerable hard-disk drive new life.

DRAMexchange, a Taipei-based market intelligence firm, said last week that the adoption of solid-state drives by computer vendors has slowed as the price of the NAND chips--the raw material of solid-state drives--has increased. The firm also said that computer makers have been cautious about using solid-state drives because current Windows operating systems are not fully optimized for SSDs.

Numonyx NAND flash chip

(Credit: Numonyx)

And the popularity of flash storage is waning in Netbooks. These tiny laptops at one time used solid-state drives almost exclusively. But Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others are moving en masse to configurations with large hard-disk drives in lieu of smaller-capacity solid-state drives.

SSDs typically offer higher performance--often much higher performance--than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts.

While those merits still apply, lingering doubts about the long-term retention of the data in a solid-state drive is making the hard disk look not quite so passé. Ed Doller, the chief technical officer of Numonyx, a flash memory chip maker which was spun off from Intel and STMicroelectronics last year, addressed this issue in a recent phone interview. Numonyx makes two kinds of flash: NOR, used for storing computer programs, and NAND, used widely as a data storage medium in digital cameras, media players, smartphones, and solid-state drives.

"It's if versus when. With a hard drive it's if it's going to fail. With an SSD, it's when is it going to fail," Doller said, who critiques NAND only because his company is looking for a new storage medium--such as phase change memory--that can overcome some of NAND's inherent limitations.

Doller spoke about an epiphany he had after booting up a 20-year-old IBM AT. "I fired that thing up and it actually booted from the hard drive. If that same computer had been built with a solid-state drive, I can almost guarantee you that would not have worked. It would have lost its information over that period of time," Doller said.

A start-up founded by former Sun Microsystems computer scientists is tapping IBM and Intel hardware to accelerate the enormous server workloads of burgeoning Web 2.0 businesses.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Schooner Information Technology announced Monday that it is readying a server appliance based on Intel's newest Nehalem processors and its solid-state drives. The first products are due by the end of May with volume shipments in the third quarter of 2009.

Hewlett-Packard and Fusion-io said recently that they are working on analogous technology and had achieved extremely high performance using Fusion-io's solid-state drives running on HP servers.

Schooner Information Technology's President and CEO John R. Busch was formerly research director of computer system architecture and analysis at Sun laboratories. Chairman and CTO Tom McWilliams was a lead engineer at Sun, working on server architecture and advanced CAD tools. Prior to that, McWilliams was a director in the MIPS division of Silicon Graphics. Both men were involved in moving Sun to multicore server architectures, according to Busch.

The company is funded by CMEA Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The current total investment is $15 million.

In a phone interview Monday, CEO Busch explained that the company has set out to fuse standalone high-performance server technologies into a faster organic whole. "Computer companies are pretty much selling boxes while others are selling networking. They're basically just selling component technologies," he said. "If you just speed up the processor or speed up the interconnect or add in flash drives, it will have a small effect."

"The observation I had when we started the company was that we really need to make a shift and we really need to put the middleware application and (our) new operating environment together with these technologies--tightly coupled with parallel flash memory and with Intel multicore processors. As opposed to loosely coupled, in order to bring their real inherent benefits through," Busch said.