Samsung has been doing tricks with flash memory all year. Early in 2006 at CeBIT the company demonstrated its 32 GB hard drive made entirely from solid state NAND flash memory. The device uses a 50 nanometer architecture and was shown off at CeBIT in a laptop. The storage device inside that laptop has already been introduced to the public, but it’s still cost prohibitive for most consumers. A gig of storage on a hard drive costs about .70 cents - compare that to a gig of NAND flash storage at almost $30.
On Sept 11th ’06 Samsung announced the world’s first 40-nanometer (nm) memory devices. The new super-dense memory is being used by Samsung in a NAND flash device with 32 Gb of storage. The new device is the first to employ Samsung’s own Charge Trap Flash (CTF) architecture. CTF is widely considered a revolutionary approach to getting more efficiency from manufacturing while improving performance of new memory cards.
Samsung sees the design simplicity of its new CTF-based NAND flash memory technology enabling higher scalability, and expects to evolve future devices from 40 to 30 and eventually 20 nm flash memory chips. The 32 G NAND flash memory can be used in CompactFlash memory cards with densities of up to 64 GB. A single 64 GB CompactFlash memory card would hold enough data to store 64 hours of DVD resolution (480P) video with sound, or about 40 movies.
If we indulge in speculation regarding Samsung’s breakthroughs in flash memory we come up with startling storage numbers. If 40 nm allows for a 64 GB CompactFlash card, consider a 30 or 20 nm CompactFlash card. We could be seeing non-volatile NAND flash memory cards with capacities beyond every hardware geek’s wildest dreams of avarice. Consider a CompactFlash card with a capacity of 256 GB. That’s a lot of … ahem, pictures. Now if we can get that kind of capacity at decent read / write speeds the era of solid state drives could be upon us before we know it.
In fact, according to Intel you can mark your calendar for the era of affordable solid state drives to be the middle of next year. For a simple investment, try support products like a CF to SATA adapter that makes solid state storage a viable option for your PC. Mass storage has never been so portable.
Now, thanks to Samsung we’ll have to re-write Moore’s Law with a special subset for NAND Flash memory.
