Effectively doubles the capacity over the 34 nm chips that are only beginning to show up in end products this quarter.
[Editor’s note: I asked Jim Bagley of Storage Strategies NOW to write on Intel/Micron’s newest 25 nm flash. Here’s his report.]
Last week Intel Micron Flash Technology (IFMT) provided tours of a NAND Flash fab in the hinterlands of Utah producing wafers at 25 nanometers. Yes, while we have all been calibrating our spreadsheets based on 34 nm lithography, the IMFT joint venture has built a 25 nm fab to crank out NAND MLC Flash that will turn the price-performance of current memory systems on their side.
They are currently sampling 8GB monolithic circuits and will be churning them out in calendar Q2 of this year. This effectively doubles the capacity over the 34 nm chips that are only beginning to show up in end products this quarter. While other wafer makers are barely getting their 34 nm fabs online, IFMT has leapfrogged to the new density, demonstrating at least an 18 month lead. Not only is this the smallest wafer technology available in the world, it is significant that it is dedicated to NAND Flash.
The new chip uses multi-level cell technology but only two bits per cell, as opposed to the three bit per cell devices in the 34 nm architecture. Intel Micron has doubled the page size to 8KB (the amount of data which must be erased prior to re-write). This does increase write amplification, but we have seen controller strategies to effectively offset this characteristic. On the other hand, the larger pages will speed other operations, so the net effect on solid state drive performance will be interesting.
IFMT says the first products to use the device will be thumb drives and the like, with solid state drives (SSD) coming on line late in the year. According to IMFT, this is due to the time it takes to get the new chips through the validation and test cycle necessary for SSD deployment. In any event, the cost side of the SSD versus HDD equation will need significant revision, as the price per gigabyte of these new SSD products, which will easily support a terabyte of capacity, will set a new benchmark.
