Posted on 07/04/2017 1:57:26 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The march of technology never ceases, and Western Digital announces its latest achievement with the creation of 96-layer NAND flash chips. Western Digital’s fourth generation of 3D NAND memory will reach volume production in 2018 and feature TLC, as well as QLC BiCS4 chips.
What is noteworthy is that as recently as last year some analysts theorized that 64-72 layers would be the cap for 3D NAND and that any additional layers weren’t feasible on current process technology. As additional layers are added to a NAND flash chip, additional layer specific TSVs are required to pass through the original layers and link up the entire stack, increasing the fabrication complexity by several factors. Western Digital has evidently surpassed these design issues and is the first to release NAND at whopping 96-layers.
TLC Flash should need no introduction, but QLC may be new to some readers. Quad Layer Cell flash adds a fourth “bit” to the cell creating a whopping 16 voltage states. This increase in storage density has the expected tradeoff of extremely limiting the program-erase cycle endurance of QLC flash down to the 100 – 150 P/E range. As such Western Digital intends to use QLC flash for things like removable USB drives but also special WORM (write once, read many) large capacity datacenter SSDs that act solely as a data repository. In such a usage scenario the low access latency, high read IOPS, and low power operation combined with the additional increase in capacity (or density) that QLC provides would make it a good fit.
Western Digital will be starting off with standard 256Gb dies for 2018 with higher density NAND to follow by 2019. Even with the announcement of BiCS4 today, the storage company has confirmed BiCS5 NAND is naturally deep into development and can be expected around the 2020 timeframe.
I wanted to be the first to do this. Now I’m crying 96 tears.
The relentless march of Moore's Law proves that we are actually working for the computers now.
One word son: “Graphene.”
What if the TLC interferes with the PDQ? Do they have to reprogram the VCR with NBA or can a CIA controler help with the DOA if there is no WTW? What about enabling the FDIC to follow MMORP protocols but without the CBO or MPH limits imposed by WTF systems to the MTR and the USDA? Alternately they could go with a full MBA or PhD protocol but use ADA assisted STTF stacking interpretation of the G4S driver agent as opposed to a EGBDF laddered setup.
Not being a true computer geek the posted article made about as much sense as what I’ve just written. I think, if I understand it right it is saying that Western Digital has created a solid state hard drive with more memory than was previously available. But, that’s just a guess.
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Pretty amazing. Soon we’ll have TB SS drives the size of a matchbook.
The relentless march of Moore’s Law proves that we are actually working for the computers now.
...
Single CPU cores haven’t done much in the past ten years, though.
It’s good to see someone give Samsung some competition.
Hi.
I have a stupid question. How do you keep the chip and surrounding architecture cool?
Liquid nitrogen?
5.56mm
That made no sense at all. But it will be used in an E-mail or two in the near future. :D
Yes, so multi-core and multi-thread technology is growing in power and flexibility.
Basically they created a way to make cheap and fast high-capacity solid state disks (SSDs), with the tradeoff being less write endurance before it wears out. It can handle about 100-150 writes per cell before it goes kaput.
It’s a good candidate for archival SSDs that need fast retrieval capability.
I actually understood most of what you wrote. The madness of my life exposed! Have a great Independence Day FReeper.
Soon we’ll have TB SS drives the size of a matchbook.
They are getting there.
SanDisk (acquired by Western Digital last year) produced a 4 bit NAND Flash cell (QLC) on their 43nm 2D Technology ~ 7 years ago. You can find some papers on it.
Obviously 4 Bit NAND on 3D stacks (BiCS) is going to be quite challenging. Kudos to their teams.
Soon the data connector and power plugin will be the largest part of the drive.
“Graphene” has been a fool’s errand for many years - any news article on graphene has ALWAYS included the qualifiers “hopefully, potential, et. al.”.
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