Tag Archives: FlashMemory

Toshiba’s chip drama ends with sale to a financial group

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The long-running bidding war over Toshiba's flash memory business has effectively come to an end... and the winner probably isn't who you expected. Toshiba has agreed to sell its NAND division to a group led by the private equity firm Bain Capital f...

Flash-based drives may soon be as cheap as the spinning kind

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If you've noticed that solid-state drives (and the PCs that include them) no longer cost an arm and a leg, you're not alone. Researchers at DRAMeXchange understand that the price per gigabyte of an SSD has fallen off a cliff in the past three years,...

Crossbar’s RRAM to boast terabytes of storage, faster write speeds than NAND

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Crossbar's RRAM to boast terabytes of storage, faster write speeds than NAND

Hardware makers often sing the praises of their latest and greatest flash memory, but the folks at Crossbar are ready to show them up with resistive RAM (RRAM) that they've been quietly working on. Compared to NAND, RRAM comes in at half the size and boasts 20 times faster write speeds (140MB/s), reads data at 17MB per second, guzzles 20 times less power and has 10 times more endurance. Since RRAM is non-volatile memory, it can keep data even when it's powered off, á la NAND. As if that weren't enough, 3D stacking construction allows for several terabytes of storage, endowing one 200 x 200mm 200mm2 chip with one terabyte.

Unlike many tech breakthroughs however -- we're looking at you, graphene -- this one is just about ready to find its way into finished products. Crossbar has manufactured RRAM within a standard chip factory, and claims that it can be churned out easily with existing production infrastructure. According to the firm, it's in the fine-tuning process and plans to introduce the tech into the world of embedded SoCs. Sure, the outfit is the exclusive holder of some RRAM patents, but it aims to license its know-how to system-on-a-chip creators.

Update: Thanks to those readers who spotted our error on the silicon area -- it's now been fixed.

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Via: VentureBeat

Source: Crossbar

Samsung Produces World’s Fastest Embedded Memory

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Samsung Electronics has just come up with the fastest possible embedded memory device in history. A pioneer and trendsetter in advanced memory technology, Samsung is going to be rolling out some very...

Samsung develops ‘world’s fastest’ embedded memory, first with eMMC 5.0

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DNP Samsung develops superfast embedded memory, first with eMMC 50

The evolution of mobile memory chips keeps moving faster, if Samsung's progress is any indication. Not eight months since churning out those speedy eMMC 4.5 chips, and the company's next version of NAND is already here. Indeed, the South Korean company says it's now in mass production of what it deems as the world's fastest embedded memory. The new eMMC PRO chip is based on 64GB 10nm class NAND flash technology and would be the first to support the eMMC 5.0 standard. The chips will be available in the usual 16, 32 and 64GB iterations and feature an interface speed of 400MB/s. The 32 and 64GB densities in particular boast random read and write speeds of 7,000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) and sequential read and write speeds of 250MB/s and 90MB/s respectively. What do all of those numbers mean? Well, they should translate to much better performance when it comes to multitasking, browsing, file transfers, HD video capture, gaming and just general computing. Combined with the firm's upcoming Exynos 5 Octa 5420 SoC, and we're champing at the bit to see them implemented in Samsung's next generation of mobile devices.

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Innodisk outs embedded SATA nanoSSD, nets 480MB per second from one chip

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Innodisk unveils tiny yet speedy embedded SATA nanoSSD

While single-chip SSDs are clearly known quantities, they usually run at a much more leisurely pace than their larger counterparts. Innodisk doesn't think size and speed have to be contradictory -- it just unveiled an embedded version of its nanoSSD that performs almost as well as its much bigger counterparts. The µSSD-based SATA chip has a tiny footprint (0.63 x 0.79 inches) and draws just 1W of peak power, but can still read at up to 480MB/s and write at 175MB/s. As such, it's one of the few SSDs that can theoretically stuff desktop-class storage into a smartphone or tablet. Whether or not it will is another matter. Innodisk hasn't named customers for the nanoSSD so far, which leaves us guessing just where or when we'll see the drive in a finished product.

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Source: Innodisk

EPFL mixes graphene and molybdenite to make very efficient, flexible flash memory

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EPFL combines graphene and molybdenite to create highspeed, lowpower flash memory

We've seen graphene chips, and we've seen molybdenite chips. What would happen if we combined the two? If EPFL's experimental flash memory is any clue, we might get one of the better blends since chocolate met peanut butter. The chip uses graphene's high conductivity for the memory itself, as well as for electrodes, but stuffs molybdenite in between to rapidly switch electrical states (such as what you'd see in write commands) while using little power. The hybrid is theoretically both faster and more power-efficient than conventional silicon designs, but that's just the start: the extra-thin nature of either material is better-suited to flexible electronics on top of shrinking the chip footprint. If there's anything at this stage that would sour EPFL's dreams of a storage utopia, it's time. There's no immediate mention of commercialization plans for the mutant memory, which could leave us stuck on silicon for awhile.

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Source: ACS Nano

Fusion-io brings Fusion ioScale SSD to small, speedy server clusters

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Fusionio brings 32TB Fusion ioScale SSDs to sma server clusters

Fusion-io has made a name for its Fusion ioDrive solid-state drives by selling them to the largest of enterprises -- the sort that crave thousands of servers. Not everyone wants that level of computing muscle, though, which is why the pro-grade storage firm is now selling the Fusion ioScale to a much wider audience. Cloud service hosts and other, smaller companies just have to buy a (relatively) paltry 100 or more of the PCI Express-based drives, which include both slim 1.6TB and full-size, 3.2TB versions. Neither will be cheap for datacenters when prices start at $3.89 per gigabyte, although Fusion-io is vowing better deals for those buying in buik. We also suspect that the time saved by moving to fast flash storage could be worthwhile in itself.

Continue reading Fusion-io brings Fusion ioScale SSD to small, speedy server clusters

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Source: Fusion-io