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Politics : RAMTRONIAN's Cache Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NightOwl who wrote (14412)	8/20/2009 3:46:03 PM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14464

Well... I have tried to consider everything that's been said at or about the recent Undead FLASH Summit. I think the most telling comments came from Sun, followed closely by Sandisk's elevated paranoia. But this tid bit, from a hardware agnostic company currently making its living by writing software workarounds to offset the ever increasing deficiencies of high density FLASH, is a very helpful piece of the puzzle: "On the topic of barriers to adoption, SSDs were declared still too expensive for mass market appeal. Also, many of the benefits promised by SSDs are being undone by bottlenecks in the OS (and file system!). As a result, it was postulated that SSDs will cannibalize 15k RPM HDDs, where customers are willing to pay a premium for speed, rather than replacing HDDs as a whole, at least in the short term. In the emerging technologies track, 3-D NAND was promoted by both Micron and SanDisk, in part because they are able to leverage the technology used to build DRAM for manufacturing 3-D NAND, making it easier and cheaper to produce. It was particularly interesting to hear SanDisk say that 4 bit per cell will have limited application in the future, especially since it had been speculated that the 4 b/c technology was a key reason for them to acquire M-Systems. PCM and FeRAM were also discussed as next generation flash technologies. Overall, we were impressed by the level of participation from across the industry and we’re already looking forward to next year’s Summit!" blog.datalight.com Sandisk is working with Toshiba on a "3-D NAND" chip. I didn't know MU was also behind such IP. In fact I have been assuming that this "3-D NAND" was a reference to some sort of chip stacking IP... rather than an 1T0C "X"FET of some kind. But now with all the recent development noise out of Japan on their ferroelectric "Fe-NAND" device... and from SRC with their support for a "FeDRAM" design, the above suggestion that the "3-D NAND" in question leverages DRAM manufacturing processes is a strong clue that, at the very least, Toshiba, MU, and Sandisk are all in development with FeFET IP for all or part of the commodity FLASH market. The timing of this development work, the SRC and Tokyo U announcements, together with the woeful outlook for 3 and 4 bit cell FLASH performance... all makes it appear very likely that FeFET products will begin to hit the streets in 2012. If true we will begin to see manufacturers with demonstration chips perhaps as early as 2010 or even this year's IEDM if the Japanese research labs are still ahead of the game. RMTR will of course have no part of that high volume commodity market, but that's a two-edged sword in that it will soon become as competitive and unprofitable as the FLASH market is now. But it does suggest that RMTR may get a major boost for its ambitions in the sub-Gb embedded NV memory/logic space. 0\|0