Moore's Law Fails At NAND Flash Node

An anonymous reader writes "SanDisk sampling its 1Y-based NAND flash memory products and has revealed they are manufactured at same minimum geometry as the 1X generation: 19 nm. The author speculates that this is one of the first instances of a Moore's Law 'fail' since the self-fulfilling prophecy was made in 1965 — but that it won't be the last."

Shortage, no.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

There's a granularity to advancement as it is made of discrete units of advancement and invention.

Also, I wouldn't pooh pooh the use of other techniques to keep things moving. In the terms economists use to analyze advancement, this is called "substitution" [juliansimon.org], and is the source of the counter-intuitive but powerfully predictive observation that, in a free economy, people can invent ahead of the curve faster than things become problems, like shortages.

NAND flash = transistors on a chip

[Comboman]

Moore's Law applies to the number of transistors in a chip. Just because you have found an increase in performance that did follow Moore's Law for a while does not mean that Moore's Law is somehow about flash memory. Therefore, when the increase no longer follows Moore's Law, it does NOT mean that Moore's Law has failed. The only thing that has failed is your own prediction that things other than the number of transistors would follow that curve.

So what do you think NAND flash is made of? Tiny spinning hard drives? Magnetic bubbles? Pixie dust? NAND flash is made of (you guessed it) transistors on chip [wikipedia.org]. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to expect it to conform to Moore's law.

Re:It has not failed yet

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If Moore's Law is about transistors on a chip, and NAND flash is a bunch of floating gate transistors on a chip, wouldn't logic follow that Moore's Law applied to NAND flash as well?

Sort of. First, they're more like "capacistors" than transistors - their size may have some implications for them that it doesn't have for normal transistors, especially now that they're essentially using multi-valued logic for the charges in those gates. Second, most logic circuits get exercised quite a lot of the time, and heat dissipation is often the limiting factor, but this isn't the case for SRAM and Flash memories, and you could cheat Murphy by going 3D and replicating the strucure along the Z axis, which is, I believe, what a lot of companies are trying to do right now. Since Moore's law is a speculative observation, and not an induction on any specific first principles in semiconductor technology, the phrasing "Moore's law should apply to X" sort of doesn't make any sense. There's no "should" here because Moore's law doesn't shy why it should apply to any specific type of circuits.