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Data Storage

World's Thinnest Flash Memory Cell Unveiled 153

Posted by CowboyNeal from the angels-stored-on-the-head-of-pin dept.
qorkfiend writes "Measuring a scant 20 nanometers across, Infineon AG's new nonvolatile flash memory cell could lead to 32 gigabit flash chips within the next few years. The cell contains a unique structure with a fin for the transistor to avoid nano-scale physical effects and uses 90% less electrons than today's memory to store data."
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World's Thinnest Flash Memory Cell Unveiled More

World's Thinnest Flash Memory Cell Unveiled

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  • Real Solid State Computing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jozer99 ( 693146 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:10PM (#11125097)
    Wow, now there might be a practical inexpensive method for solid state servers.

  • iPod (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sh1ftay ( 822471 )
    Cool, just in time for a flash based ipod.

  • Finally... (Score:5, Funny)

    by deft ( 253558 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:10PM (#11125102) Homepage
    One can carry both their MP3 AND pron collection.

    This one guy I know can finally leave the house. I'll tell him.

    • Re:Finally... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:17PM (#11125143)
      You, sir, just pre-empted 40 other people's post ideas. The angry mob will arrive any minute.

    • Re:Finally... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Trust me, no one wants this guy out in public. ever.

  • Increased susceptibility to quantum effects? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EQ ( 28372 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:10PM (#11125103) Homepage Journal
    90% fewer electrons? Does this mean less resiliency/redundancy in the chip - how vulnerable is this to quantum effects - or simple radiation?

  • does this mean (Score:5, Interesting)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:11PM (#11125108) Journal
    90% less current and since power is
    I-squared R
    that REALLY cuts the power dissapation which his the brick wall most silicon vendors now approach?

    • Re:does this mean (Score:5, Insightful)

      by morcheeba ( 260908 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:53PM (#11125328) Journal
      The article said 90% less electrons, and true, electrons (or holes) make up current, but that's not what they meant. They said it was 90% less electrons stored in each cell -- This is just a small portion of the total current used in the memory.

      An ampere of current is 6.24 * 10^18 electrons/second [madsci.org], so to write at 12 megabits/second (USB speed) would require only 1 billion electrons/second, or 0.173 nanoamps -- the rest of the chip will probably take milliamps and dwarf the actual number of electrons flowing into the cells.

      Most of the current is used to combat the capacitance [wikipedia.org] on the bit lines - since the X & Y grid wires are so close to other wires (protected by an insulator, of course), a natural capacitor forms. If you want to change the voltage on these bit lines quickly, the capacitance will demand current. You'll get the current back when you eventually try to remove the voltage, but so far it isn't really worth it to recover this current because, after resistive losses, it's at a slightly less voltage. (there are some cool schemes to pump that current into the next bitline to be accessed, but this happens more with synchronized clocks).

      Power is also dissipated by the analog sense amplifiers at the edges of the FLASH memory that convert low-level voltages to more usable digital signals.

      Power dissipation is more of a problem for processors & not FLASH memory. FLASH is all about density and cost.
    • What this should mean is greater conductivity between elements, due to less electron resistance or lower effective mass, which could lead to faster rw times.

  • replacement? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phoric ( 833867 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:11PM (#11125114)
    How about replacing a hard drive with flash chips for ultra-compact PCs? I know a lot of devices use this and some people boot linux off usb flash keys, but what about a built-in flash HD interface?

    • Re:replacement? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by databoing ( 259158 )
      Well, see, the problem with that is that Flash Memory is great for reads, but writes tend to wear out the chip. Writes require a higher voltage to perform (1.5V compared to 0.2V, I think. That may be wrong, use google) and so use as a replacement HD tends to shorten the lifespan of the device to a few months.

      Using a flash memory device as a storeage place for things unlikely to change frequently (bootable linux for troubleshooting, encryption keys, etc) doesn't do much for the wear-and-tear of the memory,

      • Re:replacement? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by m50d ( 797211 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:22PM (#11125164) Homepage Journal
        IIRC it's fine as long as you use a filesystem designed to deal with it, and don't use it for swap, logs etc. For storing your home stuff in it's fine, just have no swap and put /tmp and maybe /var on tmpfs.

        • Wear distribution (Score:3, Informative)

          by vlad_petric ( 94134 )
          Current flash cards that are used for consumer electronic products employ controllers that do wear distribution. Without such controllers, the FAT filesystem would kill them really fast.

          For "raw flash" a filesystem designed with wear distribution in mind is JFFS2.

          And yeah, I concur with tmpfs for /tmp. I'd make it default for all distros.

          • One problem with /tmpfs that I ran into with Mandrake 10 was with VMware. VMware makes huge files in /tmpfs which are memory mapped and once it fills the 32 bit virtual memory space you are hooped. So tmpfs is not always swappable with /tmp.

            --jeff++
            • My big issue with tmpfs was vi.... if I did vi on a reasonably large file the storage ran out real fast and it blew up. I didn't even attempt vmware.

              Eventually I just took the easy way out and put it back on the disk.
          • use some form of RAID-type setup where data is written to multiple flash cards according to some pattern optimized to minimize the chances of failures having an impact before you could replace the failed card(s). (You would not want to use the current RAID techniques because they would cause near-equal wear on all the cards, thus incresing the likelihood of simultaneous failures).

        • etc. For storing your home stuff in it's fine,

          Depends on what you do in /home, doesn't it? Compiling large programs over and over is a good way to kill it... Updating your mbox file frequently is a good way to kill it.

          Flash is too impractical to replace hard drives. I don't have to worry about how much I re-write my files with a hard drive.

          If you want the performance, get battery-backed RAM of some sort (SCSI controllers have had this for a long time). If you want the space-savings, you're better-off

        • > maybe /var on tmpfs.

          For the few who have real data in /var/ , a better idea is to have a /fs/var.tar.gz which is untarred into /var on boot up. (rc.local).

          Some people even tar it back on shutdown :)
      • Well the obvious solution to that problem is to simply mount ram as a hd partition, and put all the logging/write intensive files there, and only load/save them at bootup/shutdown time. For a portable device you then need to have a battery forced shut down sequence, when power falls too low, otherwise you'd loose data... If you're playing around with this kinda set up now, Compact flash comes with it's own built in IDE controller, so you simply need a pin converter.
    • Mini-ITX computers already implement this. You can buy a IDE to CF convertor for about $20(USD).
    • If the OS was built into the laptop's BIOS, it didn't keep any part of the memory on the flash drive (you'd either need a lot of memory or some other method of storing extra memory), and the replacement flash drives would be easily replaced and removed for a less-than-insane cost, then yes, it could be possible.
    • Here you go. [psism.com] A 4G, -40 ~ 85 deg C temp range, IDE flash drive, $2899.

    • I've been using Flash memory cards for booting operating systems and applications in industrial systems for years. I've also used cards with a ton of battery-backed CMOS RAM: no write constraints there. Very reliable in harsh environments compared to hard disk, I have a number of systems that have been running 24/7 since 1990. Expensive, though ... not something you'd choose for an iPod.
    • Flash has a *much* lower number of r/w cycles before it dies than a HD does..

      Now, if you use huge D/S-ram from swap and tmp, and the HD for mostly readonly.. Might not be a bad idea... ( much as a PDA does now )
    • Flashram degrades i.e. you have a limited number of writes.
      Use standard ram with a battery backup so that it doesn't loose its' state.

      Having to recharge every month or two shouldn't be a problem and we all keep regular backups don't we?

  • This flash is so thin... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:14PM (#11125122)
    ...it can currently only store '1's. '0's are still too wide to fit.
  • Can the transister technology used in the flash memory also be used to help reduce the problems occuring when developing CPUs? Do anyone of you /. people know about this?

  • 90% less = 81% lesspower too? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Transcendent ( 204992 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:19PM (#11125150)
    Since there is 90% less electrons to move, then there would be 90% less current. Power is I^2R, so (.9I)^2R = 0.81P

    Sounds very good for portable devices, although I doubt the power consumption of flash cards was that significant (compared to an LCD with a backlite).

    Although, my pen drive does get pretty warm when I'm doing enough reading/writing to it, so maybe there will be a significant benefit.
    • If there is 90% less current, there is a 99% saving in Power, not 19%. The new current is 0.1I, so the new power is (0.1 I)^2 R = 0.01 I^2R
      I'm not sure that 90% less electrons immediately leads to 90% less current, though. Everything else being equal, this is true, but perhaps other factors have changed as well.

  • To get rid of any confusion... bytes v bits (Score:4, Informative)

    by Atmchicago ( 555403 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:19PM (#11125155)

    They say 32 gigabit, not gigabyte. So if you divide 32 by 8, that makes for 4 gigabytes. At least, that's the way I understand bit-to-byte conversion.

  • From the Infineon Site [infineon.com]

    Moderate this comment
    Negative: Offtopic [mithuro.com] Flamebait [mithuro.com] Troll [mithuro.com] Redundant [mithuro.com]
    Positive: Insightful [mithuro.com] Interesting [mithuro.com] Informative [mithuro.com] Funny [mithuro.com]

  • several of the infineon execs have just started their http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4064301.stm [bbc.co.uk]pri son terms.
    on the inside the only thing that counts is who you are married to!

  • by 2009 32gb should be the norm anyways (Score:3, Insightful)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @02:34PM (#11125235) Homepage Journal
    1GB flash drives are already common, add 3 18-month periods to double 3 times over and we'll be at 8GB=32Gbits.

    Unless this hits the market significantly sooner than mid-2009, it will have competition.
  • "the new development would make nonvolatile memory chips with a capacity of 32 Gigabit possible within a few years. That is eight times the capacity of what is currently available in the market."
    Did CIOL mean Gigabyte? 32/8=4 Gbytes, 4GB cards have been on the market for a while [newegg.com].
  • So now we're counting electrons? How long before we start complaining about "electron" bloat. This appears to be the first device to address that. Enough of these massive, slow moving electrons. It's time we start looking into the pure energy components of an atom. Then we won't need these giant boxes we call computers to contain and control all those electrons.
    • we've been counting electrons for quite some time actually. When we get to a gate that can operate with 1 electron, we will be pretty much done. With they way we do things now.
      • By then we will start layering information on said electrons wave functions, spin, and other spooky stuff.

        • Urk I hope not...

          Getting my code to work is hard enough without the uncertainty principle making it impossible to tell where my RAM is and how fast it's running at the same time :)

  • Still some way to go before it's thinner than an EA wage packet, then.

    nbiar

  • is 4 294 967 296 bytes or about 4.3GB on a flash. Really good for photocameras, MP3 players and temporary backups.

  • uses 90% less electrons

    Glad to know we're conserving these rare puppies.

  • Are FinFETs the first example of a vertical feature on a chip?

    That get's me thinking, could we make a chip with smaller chip pieces that are attached vertically to the main chip. Like a Mobo with cards plugged in, but at the IC level. Maybe if the "cards" are smaller ICs also that have a keyed pattern of notches on one end that match a set of holes on the main IC, then just shaking a mix of these subunits over the main IC would get them installed. Anyone in the chip biz know if this could work?
  • From: Marketing
    To: Engineering
    Subject: The Fin

    Great work guys! Just one thing. Can you add a second fin and reshape the cell a bit? Give it a bit of a retro look? The CEO has a '59 'deVille he's especially proud of and he's been bugging us to death ever since someone in IT showed him how to actually use e-mail to include it in our ad campaigns so that he can write it off. I think we can kill 2 birds with 1 stone here, if you get my drift. Besides, your stuff will look really fast this way. And if

  • As several people have pointed out, 32 Gbits isn't a "lot". 32 GB / 8 = 4GB.

    What I think many have failed to see is that they are talking about an 8 fold increase PER CHIP. Most devices will have many chips. So what their press release says in laymens terms is, "Take the largest flash drive currently available and multiple by 8."

    Not only that but it will do it with less power. Unfortunately I don't think it's enough to make up for all the electron sucking video cards starting to hit the market right now.

  • The real point (Score:2, Interesting)

    by eadint ( 156250 )
    While everyone is complaining about math issues and how gbit and gbyte relate i think the real point is RW speed, current flash chips have horrible RW speeds my 1 GB flash card takes almost 1/2 hor to download. so it would take 16 hours to get my data (photos) of a 32 Gbyt card that would make it compleatly impractical. i would prefere to see a card that has at least CDROM read transfer speeds. that would be something worth buying.
    • 1/2 hour for 1 GB is less than 1MByte/second, so you must have an USB1 flash card or one of those USB2 "full-speed" that are still 11 mbit/sec instead of 480 mbits.

      A real USB2 flash card can download three or four times faster (it will be limited by the flash r/w speed, not the bus), and it's comparable to a 32x cdrom.
    • "current flash chips have horrible RW speeds my 1 GB flash card takes almost 1/2 hor to download."

      1: Learn to use commas.
      2: Good flash devices today can handle about 10MB/second. That's about as fast as a 68x CD-ROM. You need a USB2 flash reader and a good SD card to get that kind of performance. My generic SD card and generic USB2 flash reader does about 7MB/second.

      "so it would take 16 hours to get my data (photos) of a 32 Gbyt "

      3: This article is for a 32 gigabit flash chip, not a 32 gigabyte flash car
    • While everyone is complaining about math issues and how gbit and gbyte relate i think the real point is RW speed, current flash chips have horrible RW speeds my 1 GB flash card takes almost 1/2 hor to download. so it would take 16 hours to get my data (photos) of a 32 Gbyt card that would make it compleatly impractical. i would prefere to see a card that has at least CDROM read transfer speeds. that would be something worth buying.

      Sandisk (and Panasonic too, I think) have just come out with flash media in
  • you can't run a computer with these chips as secondary memory because the cells still die out after 10,000 or so writes to them. When will they develop everlasting flash memory chips?

    • Re:The storage capacity is nice, but.... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's actually not that hard a problem to solve. Physically, it can't be done because of the way flash memory devices work, but provided you have enough spare memory (which is what growing capacities give you), you could certainly do some fancy work in software to rewrite a given memory bank only up to N times, and then move on to the next memory bank. You'll slowly lose storage capacity over time, but if you have a 32 Gbit device, you could create a 4 Gbit device that lasted 8 times as long, or for abou

  • Price fixing company (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For everyone who doesn't know, four or so Infineon execs were just convicted of price fixing (the age-old German custom). Their arschen are going to jail! Finally the capitalists get punished for their asocial mischief :)

  • 90% Fewer Electrons! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 0x0000 ( 140863 ) <zerohex@NoSpAm.zerohex.com> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @06:11PM (#11126535) Homepage

    Now there's a marketting phrase! Can we expect IC manufacturers to start publishing an "electron count" for their products? How many ways can that be spun into deceptive marketing .... "Well, Brand X claims they're using fewer electrons than we are, but they're not telling you about the anicillary effects that consume 27% more electrons than the Acme Electron Lite Reduced Electron Count (REC) model. The fact is, our revolutionary REC technology represents a quantum leap in facilitated innovation..."

  • Jeez, how retro. Everybody know that these days, to make something go faster you have to give it a rad paint-job, wicked rims and a set of neons underneath!
  • What a wonderful time we live in, where they're actually using phrases like "90% less (well, fewer) electrons to store the data." Actually starting to measure data storage in terms of electrons, makes it sound like we're on the way to the ultimate (1 electron=1 bit ). :-)

    -d

  • How big is an electron? In nanometers? Does it get bigger when it's travelling in a wire? Or in a "cathode ray"? How close can they get in spatial distance before appreciable electronic repulsion forces them apart? How many joules are required to accelerate one from "rest" (eg, charging a capacitor) to their speed at 1.5V in 1E-9s? Or, to prove I'm not completely lazy (or physics illiterate), how about the equations in those units, and I'll do the math myself?

  • smaller, faster, sooner (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @10:03PM (#11127609) Homepage Journal
    20nm across means 1cm^2 can hold 250B(illion) cells, each 1 bit. That's 32GB(yte) chips in a cm^2. I have a 1GB SD chip in my Treo's SDIO slot, which cost $67 [pricewatch.com] today. A 32GB chip is only 5.7 times denser (in each planar dimension). In the other direction, a 32GB SD chip (similarly less dense in the same 32/5.7x scale) today costs $10, which includes the overhead of the rest of the package.

    I'm not so jaded that I think 20nm isn't so small. These numbers really scream how tiny a scale in which we're already producing engineering commodities. I just think that we'll see an increase in Flash density, driven more by the exploding market and R&D money than by physical and engineering limits. 3D memory array packages are long overdue: how about taking that 1GB chip, and arraying its 200nm cells within a 32Kx32Kx0.5K array, a millimeter-thick sandwich of cells and address bus layers, for a 0.5TB chip? 4 of those in an SD package would make a great 2TB cell the size of a quarter-dollar coin. By the time the packaging is engineered, the tech discussed in this thread will have shrunk cell size by at worst half, so 8x0.5TB layered chips can not only offer 4TB, but the address busses can offer a hypercube (or higher-order) topology, for parallel accesses.

    Then we can get really fancy. Dedicate 1% of the Flash cells among the busses to FPGA logic cells in 100-cell clusters. That tiny parallel machine is now potentially the fastest supercomputer on the planet. That path to a "hypernanocomputer" is purely evolutionary, in terms of IC fabrication. If that were say, Intel, IBM or Fujitsu's roadmap, we could be there within 5 years, maybe 2-3 years. C'mon, someone over at Infineon get to work and really impress us.

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