Samsung yesterday announced initial production of a new 1-gigabyte flash memory chip designed expressly for smartphones.
Hailing from the company’s OneNAND lineup, the new chips are faster than traditional smartphone NAND by a factor of four, Samsung says. Combined with the company’s new 30nm-class process technology, unveiled in December, and low-voltage characteristics, OneNAND chips such as this are an ideal solution for smartphones and tablets.
“We are happy to see that our advanced 30nm-class NAND solution is being widely adopted in smartphones,” said Sejin Kim, vice president, Flash memory planning/enabling, Samsung Electronics. “The availability of an [1-gigabyte] OneNAND chip will add considerably to our diverse line-up of advanced mobile memory solutions.”
Samsung says that the new 1-gigabyte chip will enter mass production at the end of this month.
What is OneNAND?
Samsung’s OneNAND products are an innovative combination of three technologies on a single chip: mass storage (NAND flash cell), cache (SRAM) and a logic chip.
The role of the NAND flash cell is identical to what you would find in a thumb drive or an SSD: it stores user information.
The SRAM section of a OneNAND chip acts as a read/write buffer, which permits for data to be read or written more quickly to the flash cell. An appropriate analogy might be a bundle of letters being delivered to you by multiple people. Received one at a time, the letters might arrive out of order. If those people were queued in the right order before being sent off, however, you would get through them in the right order quite a bit faster–such is SRAM.
Finally, the logic section of a OneNAND chip provides devices with the ability to read and write data (“NOR interface” on the diagram) and to correct errors in the stored data (“ECC” on the diagram).
OneNAND is special because it combines the mass storage of NAND-type flash memory with the read/write performance of NOR-type memory.
Most cell phones have traditionally used NOR-type flash memory for its fast read speeds, but that performance has always come at the expense of smaller memory stores, slower writes and higher prices. NAND flash, meanwhile, offers cheap and expansive data storage, but it’s poor at reading data (the hoops researchers have had to jump through to make NAND viable for mass storage would astound you).
This combination of NAND storage and NOR performance allows device makers to make three big, cost-saving changes:
- Because of OneNAND’s NOR-type interface, it can be used like RAM, meaning device makers can use less physical RAM to achieve the same performance.
- Because OneNAND is a bootable storage medium that also offers mass storage, device makers can condense the operating system (typically stored on a NOR chip) and user data (typically stored on NAND chips) onto a single chip.
- Fewer chips has the peripheral effect of reducing circuit board complexity, which understandably lowers costs as well.
In short, Samsung’s OneNAND products are an easy option for smartphone makers looking to equip their future devices with storage that saves money while improving both capacity and performance.
Articles RSS