Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

LOS ANGELES--Adobe Systems' announcement of tools to create applications for the Apple iPhone comes with some restrictions.

Adobe announced on Monday at Adobe MAX, the company's worldwide developer conference, that its Flash Professional CS5 developer tool will enable developers to create interactive applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 is expected to be available later this year.

In an interview at the conference Monday, Anup Murarka, director of technology strategy and partner development in Adobe's platform development unit, spelled out some of the limitations of creating Adobe Flash-style apps for the iPhone. These limitations exist because the Adobe Flash player is not supported on the iPhone.

Murarka clarified that Monday's announcement was not a joint announcement with Apple. "This is an Adobe announcement. This is just something that's related to our tools and what they output, which is a native iPhone app," he said.

"So, we're not running Flash directly on the device. We're actually allowing our tools to output for native iPhone apps," Murarka explained.

He then described some limitations. "Let's take it from the developer's point of view. They have a very rich environment and language. That's in Flash today," he said. "You're not going to get all of the Flash feature set that would normally be there in the run-time."

Murarka continued: "For example, high-quality video, H.264, is not available with this product because Apple does not make available the decoders. They make you use their own UI (user interface) to play back high-quality video." Apple describes the H.264 video codec as delivering "stunning quality at...low data rates."

He also cited synchronization. "Being able to do synchronization between data and video. Those can be built as Flash applications. In sporting events (for example) using flash for data overlay. Those types of things are not going to possible because we don't have access to the APIs (Application Programming Intefaces) that would give us the video decode along with all of the individual frames so we can do synchronization," he said.

And he spoke about graphics effects. "Some of the filter effects. Some of the capabilities that as a programmer you would easily do within Flash are not available as they are not natural APIs that iPhone platform makes available to us."

Murarka concluded by saying that Adobe continues to work with Apple towards getting Flash on the iPhone. "We're not there as quickly as we would like. We're not able to put Flash in the browser. We're not able to put a Flash run-time on the device directly. But this is a good step," he said.

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.

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 appears ready to take another crack at flash memory-based acceleration--this time offering it with future chipsets.

Intel Braidwood technology is based on a flash memory module.

(Credit: Intel)

"Braidwood is a flash memory technology that provides faster boot-up time, faster application launch, and a snappier, more responsive system," said Rob Crooke, vice president and general manager of Intel's Business Client Group, speaking during a presentation streamed over the Web from the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, earlier this week.

Braidwood will be offered with the future "5 Series" chipset family--which is Intel's first single-chip chipset--and the future "Clarkdale" processor (see discussion below).

The architecture accelerates I/O (input/output) accesses by saving that data to flash memory, according to Crooke. In a demonstration at Computex, Crooke showed Braidwood "caching the I/O...And then, when it launches that application again, it happens very quickly," he said.

Intel's first stab at technology analogous to Braidwood came in 2006. That product was code-named Robson and eventually branded as Turbo Memory. But it only received lukewarm reviews and was never adopted widely.

"Clarkdale," a Nehalem-based processor, will be offered with Braidwood, according to Intel documentation released at Computex. Clarkdale will integrate graphics silicon into the same package as the main processor. It is on track to begin production in the fourth quarter of this year--with systems available in 2010--and is built on Intel's second-generation 32-nanometer process technology. Clarkdale will be offered with the Intel 5 Series chipset.

On another front, Crooke also talked about the mainstreaming of Intel's Nehalem Core i7 desktop chips, which are currently limited to high-end enthusiast systems. Due later this year, the "Lynnfield" processor is a new four-core, eight-thread processor that will be paired with the P55 Express chipset. Threads essentially double the number of tasks a processor can perform.

Users can expect 40 percent better performance on widely used SPECint benchmarks with the Lynnfield-based platform, compared with last year's mainstream Core Q9650 processor-based technology, Crooke said.

Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.

Solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips as the storage medium, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives. But they cost more. Currently, opting for an SSD instead of a hard-disk drive will add anywhere between $100 and $600 to the cost of a laptop, depending on the capacity of the SSD.

Dell's Alienware Area-51 laptop (above) and Dell's Studio XPS 16 come with a 256GB solid-state drive option

(Credit: Dell)

In a phone interview, Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, said reaching price parity with hard-disk drives is just a matter of time. "Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year," he said. "Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years." Samsung makes both SSDs and HDDs.

Beard explained why a cost gap persists between solid-state drives and hard-disk drives. "The difference in cost is fundamentally very different. A hard drive has a fixed cost of $40 or $50 for the spindle, the motors, the PCB (printed circuit board), the cables," he said. "To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn't really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive." (The price for most laptop-class hard-disk drives on the market is between $60 and $100 at retail, Beard said.)

"When you contrast this with SSDs, they also have a fixed cost for the PCB and the case and the controller, which is lower than the fixed cost of a hard drive," according to Beard. "But as you scale the capacity of the SSD up, the cost scales linearly. For example, if the spot price of the flash chip itself is $2, a 64GB drive is going to cost $128 just for the flash and then you would add the fixed cost of the PCB and the case, he said. So, the cost will double as you double the capacity, according to Beard.

This argument, however, works in favor of lower solid-state drive pricing too--as flash memory prices drop and densities and capacities increase. And Beard added that "there's a lot of pressure for OEMs (PC makers) to match the price to the traditional pricing in the hard-drive industry." Samsung is also a PC maker and faces the same pressures.

And what will happen to the price of SSDs this year? "The rest of the year is quite unpredictable. Because the SSD price is directly tied to the price of flash, no one knows. Everyone is just giving their best guess as to what will happen in the flash market," he said. To date, flash memory prices have dropped so much that chipmakers can't make money.

"Every major flash manufacturer posted major losses in Q4. So flash and SSD manufacturers are under a lot of pressure to make a profit," Beard said.

Where is the price-per-gigabyte sweet spot for solid-state drives going to be later this year? "On the business side, the sweet spot is 64(GB) moving to 128. On the consumer side it's definitely 128 moving to 256," he said.

Samsung SSDs with a capacity of 256GB have been shipping since January. Dell offers these drives in some laptop models already. 256GB drives are just now "rolling out into mass production," Beard said. "We'll start shipping it to some of our smaller customers about right now."

Note: Currently, on a Dell Studio XPS 16, opting for a 128GB SSD instead of a 7200rpm 320GB HDD adds $200 to the price of the system. Opting for a 256GB SSD adds $400.

Memory chipmakers, the hardest-hit of the silicon suppliers, this week faced bankruptcy, layoffs, and bleak prospects.

Micron Technology kicked things off by announcing that it would cut as many as 2,000 jobs. Micron and other memory chip manufacturers are all singing the same sad song: slumping revenues amid a steep downward price spiral.

The largest U.S. maker of memory chips said decreased demand for specialty DRAM products had "created additional challenges" for its Boise, Idaho, manufacturing operations. As a result, Micron said it will phase out 200-millimeter wafer manufacturing operations at the company's Boise facility.

The same day, flash memory chipmaker Spansion, previously a joint venture of Advanced Micro Devices and Fujitsu, announced layoffs totaling approximately 3,000, or 35 percent of the company's total workforce.

Spansion's CEO, John Kispert, said the Sunnyvale, Calif., company has been forced to "bring our costs in line with the current expectations for significantly reduced revenues."

Kispert also mentioned that he is positioning the company for a "restructuring and/or sale." The company expects the reduction in workforce to provide it with annual cash cost savings of approximately $225 million.

But this wasn't the worst of it. Qimonda, an affiliate of Germany-based Infineon Technologies, said on the same day that it was seeking bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 for its U.S. unit. In January, Qimonda filed for insolvency protection in Germany after it was not able to secure government financing.

Intel topped off the bad news on Wednesday by disclosing that it was considering getting out of the flash memory-manufacturing business. Intel CEO Paul Otellini made this statement at a Goldman Sachs investor's conference: "It may not be essential for us to have our own NAND factories to build (flash memory). We could probably specify the product that we want and buy it from third parties," he said.

Is there any upside to all this bad news? Maybe.

"A lot of the end-market conditions for all electronics are awful, but we know all this already, and to a certain extent, that is looking backward," said Avi Cohen, managing partner of Avian Securities, which tracks the memory chip market. "Several component (suppliers) and semi(conductor) guys have echoed the fact that February is not getting worse, which is a nice improvement."

SanDisk is disclosing at a San Francisco technology conference Tuesday that it will begin mass production of memory chips that will allow consumers to store up to 64GB of data on tiny flash cards.

SanDisk X4 memory chip packs in four bits per cell

(Credit: SanDisk)

The Milpitas, Calif., company's X4 technology will pack four bits of data into each memory cell. To date, flash memory chipmakers typically stored one bit or two bits per cell.

SanDisk--the largest supplier of retail flash cards--is making the disclosure jointly with Toshiba at the 2009 International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The two companies will use 43-nanometer manufacturing process technology to make the chips.

X4 technology, which SanDisk got when it purchased M-Systems in 2006, will yield tiny Secure Digital (SD) flash cards that hold 64GB of data. Currently, mainstream SanDisk SD cards top out at 16GB, though pricey 32GB cards are also on the market.

"It is a 64-gigabit single die (chip), which is 8GB (per die), the highest capacity point in the industry," said Khandker Quader, senior vice president, memory technology & product development, SanDisk, in a phone interview Monday.

In addition to the memory chip, the die also includes an X4 controller--which manages the data flow. The memory and controller "will be sold as an integrated solution," Quader said. Controllers are the secret sauce used by flash card and solid-state drive suppliers to boost performance. The importance of controllers increases as flash chip densities increase because higher densities require increasingly sophisticated controllers to deliver the necessary performance.

The memory technology itself--the 4 bits per cell 64-gigabit memory--is co-developed and co-owned by SanDisk and Toshiba. The X4 controller technology is solely owned by SanDisk, Quader said. SanDisk and Toshiba also have joint manufacturing facilities in Japan.

The advancement is important because NAND flash--like all silicon chasing Moore's Law--is facing challenges to increase densities "even at two bits and three bits per cell," he said. (NAND is the type of memory used in flash cards and solid-state drives.)

A SanDisk paper at the ISSCC will discuss the performance of the X4 technology. Data speeds will hit 7.8 megabytes per second, Quader said. "This is comparable to what others are producing at lower bits per cell," he said.

X4 flash cards will be available commercially in the first half of 2009, according to Quader.

SanDisk will also present a paper on 32-nanometer X3 technology--three bits per cell--for use in thumbnail-size microSD cards (even smaller than SD cards) that boast capacities up to 16GB. X3 will also be used in solid-state drives, SanDisk said.

Despite these advancements, SanDisk is still a laggard in the emerging solid-state drive market, where companies like Samsung, Toshiba, Micron Technology, and Intel are the early leaders. SanDisk announced at CES in January that it would deliver a 240GB SSD by mid-year.

Solid-state drives may see heady growth despite a sliding world economy, according to a report released Tuesday by a market research company. Devices like the Apple iPod and iPhone are expected to drive growth.

Micron Technology along with its partner Intel are challenging SSD market leaders Samsung and Toshiba, In-Stat said

(Credit: Micron)

Flash memory revenue in the solid-state drive segment will see compound annual growth rates of over 100 percent through 2012, according to market research firm In-Stat. The type of flash used in solid-state drives is referred to as NAND flash.

"You're starting from quite a small base. Back in 2006, you're in the tens of millions (of dollars) kind of a number. By 2012, you're easily over five billion. So the growth rates do get rather high," said Ian Lao, a senior analyst at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based In-Stat. The market researcher forecasts compound annual growth at 106 percent from 2006 through 2012, Lao said.

In the consumer segment, Lao says he expects to see most of the growth in small devices like portable music players and smart phones. Music players such as the Apple iPod and Microsoft Zune will adopt solid-state drives instead of the tiny 1.8-inch hard disk drives they use now because of better durability and shock resistance. "They suffer the risk of, hey, I just dropped my Zune, it doesn't work anymore," Lao said. SSDs will provide much greater reliability, he said.

And as smart phones become more PC-like, they will graduate from relatively simple flash drives to more sophisticated SSDs with the same Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces used in PCs today, Lao said. An iPhone, for example, with a more computer-like operating system and features would use an SSD, Lao said.

Future ultra-portable laptops, represented today by the MacBook Air and HP Voodoo Envy 133, will also drive SSD growth, as will Netbooks.

Sharp growth will also be seen in the corporate enterprise market. SSDs will, in an increasing number of cases, replace very-high-speed hard disk drives in server environments, Lao said.

Flash drives (non-SSD) will remain widely used in various music players, mobile handsets, after-market cards, and USB flash drives, with a combined market share of more than 80 percent during the next couple of years, according to the report. However, this percentage will drop to about 70 percent by 2012, as SSDs grow in importance, the report said.

Worldwide NAND flash revenues are likely to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29.7 percent from 2007 to 2012 to reach $61 billion, In-Stat said. Revenues for NOR flash--used, for example, to store program code in cell phones--will increase at a 6 percent compound annual growth rate from 2007 through 2012.

Toshiba hasn't exactly been on the cutting edge of the Netbook phenomenon but the Japanese company is taking the lead in moving solid-state drive storage in these tiny laptops to the next level.

Toshiba is adding a 64GB solid-state drive to its NB100 Netbook offering, in addition to the current 160GB hard disk drive option.

While Sony's Vaio P series will be available with SSD options up to 128GB SSD, it's problematic whether Sony's tiny laptop qualifies as a Netbook, which are defined by price as well as size. The Vaio P with a 64GB SSD is $1,199. With the 128GB option this jumps to $1,499. Pricing that's way out of the range of Netbooks, which typically top off at about $500.

And HP offers an 80GB SSD option on the pricey Mini 2140 Netbook (which ranges up to $779). Though pricing is not available for the Mini 2140 80GB SSD option on HP's Web site, an 80GB SSD is priced at $520 as a configuration option on the Pavilion dv3z series notebook

Toshiba is adding a 64GB solid-state drive option to its NB100 Netbook

(Credit: Toshiba)

The Toshiba NB100--which is not currently marketed in the U.S.--features Windows Vista Home Premium, an Intel Atom N270 processor (1.6GHz), Intel 945GSE graphics, 1GB of memory, an 8.9-inch display, a multimedia card slot (SD), three USB 2.0 ports, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and a Webcam.

Pricing was not disclosed though current models sold with a 160GB hard disk drive are priced typically between $450 and $500.