Toshiba to ship 32nm process NAND flash memory
By Darren Murph 
posted Apr 27th 2009 11:35AM
posted Apr 27th 2009 11:35AM
Man, talk about a lightning quick turnaround. Just over two months ago, Toshiba was caught showing off 32 nanometer NAND flash chips, and now the firm's gloating about being the world's first to hit the "ship" button. Er, it will be should everything continue as planned. As the story goes, Tosh will start mass production of 32Gb NAND flash memories in July 2009, while 16Gb products will begin to ship in Q3 of this year. The point to this madness? To get more memory into smaller devices, which ought to make future smartphone / MID / UMPC buyers quite jovial.[Image courtesy of Tech-On]
If only more technologies had a quicker turnaround time.
Now available for the low low price of $20 per GB.
Does this mean that higher capacity SSD's are around the corner?
Not just higher capacity, but cheaper prices. 45nm will have to go down in price to compete, 32nm will be cheaper due to higher yields and more per dye. Initially it will be more expensive so Toshiba recoup their losses, but it will force every other manufacturer to shrink their dyes.
It's die not dye.
You had me at cheap
I can already feel that I'm getting markedly more jovial.
now, whats the next step? 24nm?
22nm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_nanometer
Actually, the next step is a half-step which is 28nm.
I thought they already did multi-stacked flash, so next is 32 ontop of 32 possibly, before going further, IBM or someone has to find a way to go smaller first before they can start doing it.
It would otherwise be 23nm (half of 45nm).
Each generation is 2^(-1/2) as large as the last one.
As mentioned above, NAND very often takes half steps, for example there was 55nm NAND between 65nm and 45nm.
It's actually 22nm, not 23, if it matters :P
Toshiba recentely is really doing cool stuff. Scib now!!
And it'll be a riot as the lifespan of the NAND gets worse and worse at smaller lithos.
Currently it's at some 10,000-50,000 erase cycles. It'll probably be a fraction of that at 32nm.
Why do you think that?
Indeed. The 32nm flash is really crappy. Coworkers have been working for it for some time already.
You have to whiten all your data in order to get the same number of write cycles as the previous generation NAND. And the leakage is starting to become a problem. I'm told the data retention spec is bit over 90 days now. That means turn your device off for 3 months and it'll start to lose bits. The ECC will keep you in the game for much longer than 3 months, but to me it's still very scary. Is it really that useful to have a storage device that is fast if I have to worry about the data evaporating? It makes me wonder if spinning media still holds the upper hand for the foreseeable future.
Wwhat:
It happens because the floating gates in the NAND are so small now they don't hold a lot of electrons. So it means fewer have to leak out over time in order to change the value of a cell from 1 to 0. Additionally, MLC NAND stores one of 4 different values in a cell, which means even fewer electrons have to leak in order to change the value in the cell.
Obviously they'll resolve the issues with new forms of MLC or just move everything to SLC
loosely_coupled:
It's great to see optimists like you in the world.
But seriously, I just told you how they plan to fix it. More ECC and data whitening.
MLC will still be MLC and SLC will still be SLC. There'd be no point in eliminating MLC, because then 32nm would hold no more data than 45nm (MLC) did in a given area at a given price. To make things worse, there is now 3LC NAND which stores 3 bits (8 values) per cell.
will this actually benefit MicroSDHC in any way? I know that the spec theoretically supports more than 32GB but that's the "limit" imposed for Micro SDHC before going to SDXC. Are there similar imposed limits on standard size SD cards as well?
It's nice that they're making progress with density, but they really need to work on making the stuff last longer too rather than just giving in to the screams of "MOAR CAPACITY".
Why must people insist on using gigabits (Gb) and not gigabytes (GB)? Saying that, it is still an impressive 4GB per chip.
Its how the manufacturers do it..
so how much porn will this store?
None until its put into a device and then its limited by the amount of chips they put in.
someone's being anal (couldnt resist)