Flash Memory Conference celebrates 35th anniversary of Masuoka’s invention

Author: EIS Release Date: Aug 22, 2022

This year the Flash Memory Conference, held in Santa Clara last week, celebrated the 35th anniversary of the invention of flash by Fujio Masuoka (pictured) now a professor at Tohoku University and CTO of Unisantis Electronics.

 

 

Writing for TechInsights, one of the presenters, Dr Jeongdong Choe, has distilled the key points from this year’s conference. Here they are:

 

Samsung spotlighted 4 areas of technological advancement driving the big data market; data movement, data storage, data processing, and data management. Samsung announced the ‘Memory-semantic SSD’ that combines the benefits of storage and DRAM memory, AI- and ML-optimized storage. The industry’s first UFS 4.0 mobile storage, developed by the firm in May, was introduced. It is scheduled to enter mass production this month. Samsung highlighted SmartSSD and CXL DRAM, which have been designed to avoid bottlenecks in current memory and storage architectures.

 

SK Hynix recently shipped the first V8 238-Layer 512Gb TLC 4D NAND Flash to customers in July and is expected to begin mass production in 1H 2023. SK Hynix is developing 1Tb 238-layer products. The company’s first DDR5 DRAM-based CXL samples were also introduced. Solidigm introduced P41 plus SSD with 144L-Q. They also showed the world’s first working Penta-Level Cell (PLC) SSD chip sample with 192L-Q at the keynote, with the ability to store five bits of data per memory cell for the first time, 25% more data in the same footprint compared to quad-level cell (QLC) SSDs.

 

KIOXIA launched 2nd Gen XL-FLASH SCM solution based on MLC (2bit/cell) BiCS FLASH. 1st Gen was SLC-based. The Gen2 XL-FLASH will have a memory capacity of 256Gb/die. Product sample shipments are scheduled to start in November, with volume production expected to begin in 2023.

 

YMTC introduced X3-9070 TLC 3D NAND Flash sample products powered by Xtacking 3.0 Architecture, 4th gen. 3D NAND (1Tb TLC die, likely 232L 6-plane design).

 

Some of the conference’s lessons and discussion points were:

 

XPoint is a brand new PCM

 

Intel Optane DIMM and persistent Memory losses are totaled over $7 billion since 2016

 

Lithography and product costs limit XPoint two- or four-layer stacking which results in difficulties for higher density (no more Gen3)

 

Limited value proposition for coherent persistent memory

 

Limited partnerships, for example, failed with Microsoft

 

CXL interface SSDs will possibly replace Optane persistent memory or SCM (Storage Class Memory) market in the future.

 

Ten key things to remember about memory are:

 

The future of NAND is NAND (not replaced by any of EM/XPoint)

 

The future of DRAM is DRAM (not replaced by any of EM/XPoint)

 

The memory wall is real and getting worse

 

Samsung and SK Hynix consider cost and market needs more than revealing new tech nodes, different from Micron

 

Computational storage/memory is becoming popular

 

CXL will be mainstream in storage and datacenter

 

MRAM is increasingly common in embedded devices

 

Hybrid storage systems such as FLASH + HDD are still not dead

 

Management of metadata is increasingly important

 

Optane XPoint Memory is gone, and CXL-DRAM/NAND memory will replace it for SCM applications.