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It is somewhat difficult to relate how changes in 内存 technology might impact you in everyday life. In this blog post I want to take the opportunity to shed some light on how the most recent advancements in NAND technology from 微米 help satisfy the human element of ever-increasing storage needs. 微米’s recent announcement of the industry first 64 layer 3D NAND enterprise 固态硬盘 could lead you to wonder ‘why is 64 layer 3D NAND such a big deal?’
The development of 64 layer 3D NAND means 64 gigabytes of storage in a single 内存 chip. This can mean many different things depending on the perspective we apply when evaluating the impact. To the people taking selfies that can mean over 9,000 pictures that get posted on social media, 10 hours of high definition video documenting happy memories for families, 或者超过15岁,000 songs to keep the music playing as we move through day to day life.
3D NAND is a revolutionary storage technology that allows 64GB of storage to fit in a package smaller than your fingernail. This is truly amazing when we consider the first NAND-based USB drives that came to market in 2000 measured density in 兆字节 (MB). 不到20年, the industry has seen tremendous advances in technology and now measures USB flash drives in TBs rather than MBs. For many years the industry pushed up storage density and pushed down the cost per GB of that storage by shrinking the width of the electrical circuitry in each generation (measured in nanometers – billionths of a meter). As the scaling limitations in ever-shrinking lithography were realized, leaders in industry needed a new way to grow the density of each device while also reducing relative cost per GB. The most recent catalyst in NAND technology to achieve this has been the implementation of 3D stacking technologies that allow for figurative skyscrapers of storage to be layered one on top of another.
用房地产术语来说, in order to enable a denser population of people per acre, the method has changed from shrinking the streets to build more houses on the block into building skyscrapers of housing. 也, to continue to improve NAND designs, new ways of architecting the logic or periphery were introduced in 3D NAND products. Known most commonly as “CMOS under the array”, 微米 has added this technology to our 3D NAND which has emerged as a key factor in having one of the most dense and efficient GBs per MM^2 available on the market today. Much like modern subway systems that are critical to moving people around in big cities, 微米 has utilized the space under the storage array to shrink the total physical dimensions needed to store more bits per piece of silicon.
最后但并非最不重要的, one of the critical performance metrics that is consistently measured in various NAND devices is programming throughput, 以MB/s每秒为单位. To improve performance in this regard, 微米 is working on a quad plane NAND architecture that gives the host the ability to program the device very efficiently bringing the data throughput up. If the NAND device was analogous to a car wash and the numbers of planes were equivalent to the number of wash bays available to move cars in and out, 微米 has added more bays with the additional planes in these NAND designs. 无论哪种情况, more bays on a car wash or more planes on a NAND, this is a logical way to increase your throughput of cars through the wash or data through a NAND.
With the ever-increasing need for storage in personal, 专业, 移动和数据中心应用程序, there is little doubt that technology will continue to evolve in the future to meet market needs. 微米 will continue to find innovative ways to increase the storage capacity of NAND, improve the performance of each device, and introduce features that will expand the effective implementation of NAND. 也就是说, it is still profound to reflect on where we have been, what is capable with the technologies of the day, and the underlying advancements that enable each incremental selfie.