flash

Storage specialist SanDisk is to take to the stage at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) to present what it claims is the future of flash storage: a three-bits-per-cell chip capable of squeezing 128Gb into 170 square millimetres.

Like Intel and Micron's joint announcement late last year of a 128Gb flash memory chip, SanDisk is boasting of increase capacities. Where its competitor is using a 20nm process size, however, SanDisk has shrunk down even further to 19nm.

A graduate student speaking at the 10th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies this week, said that as NAND flash densities increase, so do issues such as read and write latency and data errors. This is something we've known about for some time, but it appears that that many did not. Researchers tested 45 different NAND flash chips that ranged in size from 72 nanometer (nm) circuitry to 25nm technology. The chips came from six vendors and they found that program speed (write speed) for pages in a flash block suffered dramatic and predictable variations in latency.