Sandisk revealed that it will be transitioning its 24 nm flash production to a new 19 nm generation to remain cost competitive in the industry.
24 nm flash accounted for about 60 percent of the production in the third quarter; Q4 is likely to see an increase in 24 nm manufacturing while 19 nm is ramping up and should enable the company to deliver higher-capacity both 2-bit-per-cell MLC as well as 3-bit-per-cell X3 memory in 2012.
Sandisk expects its 2012 captive bit growth rate to be "somewhat higher than in 2011" due to the aggressive transition to 19 nm flash. Its growth will strongly depend on this move as well as the yields it can achieve on this new step, the company told analysts, during the recent Q3 earnings conference call. Sandisk noted that the total 2011 investment to enable 24 nm and 19 nm production will be between $1.4 billion to $1.6 billion.
CEO Sanjay Mehrotra confirmed that the 19 nm generation will follow the 24 nm product trend and make its way into general flash memory products as well as SSDs. However, it appears that Sandisk is especially shooting for an opportunity in the ultramobile market in the near future as Mehrotra described both tablets and smartphones as "strong" growth drivers. "I think you'll see that tablets are going to use large amount of flash in the future, and the numbers for tablets as a category are continuing to grow strongly and same thing applies for flash," he said.
2011年11月8日星期二
2011年10月12日星期三
FeTRAM: A New Idea to Replace Flash Memory
Researchers at Purdue University are developing a new type of memory that is promised to be faster and less energy intensive than Flash.
I cannot quite remember how long we have been discussing a replacement for flash memory, which was first shown by Intel in 1988 in the shape of a shoebox-sized 256 Kb NOR flash board and was followed by a NAND version produced by Toshiba one year later. Back in 2004, I wrote an article for Tom's Hardware that discussed possible successors for flash. The common belief in the industry was that flash economics would be running out of steam sometime in 2007 or 2008.
Seven years later, flash is still going strong, but we are still talking about successors, we just don't know what it will be and when they will be mature enough to compete with the now 22-year old NAND technology. Purdue now suggests that it could be a "ferroelectric" polymer that enables the development of a "new type of ferroelectric transistor."
Called FeTRAM, the memory is said to be in a "very nascent stage" and there is not even a prototype. However, the theory and a test circuit exist and the scientists behind the project claim that the technology will enable memory devices that are faster than flash and consume less power.
"Our present device consumes more power because it is still not properly scaled," said Saptarshi Das, one of the scientists working on the technology.. "For future generations of FeTRAM technologies one of the main objectives will be to reduce the power dissipation. They might also be much faster than another form of computer memory called SRAM."
There was no information when the technology will be shown in a prototype, but Das noted that a patent application has already been filed. According to the researchers, FeTRAMs "are similar to state-of-the-art ferroelectric random access memories, FeRAMs, which are in commercial use but represent a relatively small part of the overall semiconductor market." However, other than FeRAMs, FeTRAMs allow for "nondestructive readout, meaning information can be read without losing it."
I cannot quite remember how long we have been discussing a replacement for flash memory, which was first shown by Intel in 1988 in the shape of a shoebox-sized 256 Kb NOR flash board and was followed by a NAND version produced by Toshiba one year later. Back in 2004, I wrote an article for Tom's Hardware that discussed possible successors for flash. The common belief in the industry was that flash economics would be running out of steam sometime in 2007 or 2008.
Seven years later, flash is still going strong, but we are still talking about successors, we just don't know what it will be and when they will be mature enough to compete with the now 22-year old NAND technology. Purdue now suggests that it could be a "ferroelectric" polymer that enables the development of a "new type of ferroelectric transistor."
Called FeTRAM, the memory is said to be in a "very nascent stage" and there is not even a prototype. However, the theory and a test circuit exist and the scientists behind the project claim that the technology will enable memory devices that are faster than flash and consume less power.
"Our present device consumes more power because it is still not properly scaled," said Saptarshi Das, one of the scientists working on the technology.. "For future generations of FeTRAM technologies one of the main objectives will be to reduce the power dissipation. They might also be much faster than another form of computer memory called SRAM."
There was no information when the technology will be shown in a prototype, but Das noted that a patent application has already been filed. According to the researchers, FeTRAMs "are similar to state-of-the-art ferroelectric random access memories, FeRAMs, which are in commercial use but represent a relatively small part of the overall semiconductor market." However, other than FeRAMs, FeTRAMs allow for "nondestructive readout, meaning information can be read without losing it."
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