Infineon Scales Flash Memory Cells To 20 NM

KingFish

Scientists at semiconductor company Infineon said that it has built the world's smallest Flash memory cell. Measuring just 20 nm, the cell is about 5000 times thinner than a human hair.

Despite its introduction dates more than 16 years back, Flash memory today experiences growing popularity, not just because growing memory needs in compact portable audio players and digital cameras but most recently also because of the convenience of USB memory sticks. The technology, currently manufactured in 170 nm to 90 nm production processes, however faces threats from new non-volatile memory technologies such as MRAM being developed as potential successors.

Continued scaling of Flash is critical to increase performance and capacity of the devices. Intel announced in September that it just has started a program to move Flash to a 65 nm production process, but that "visibility" beyond 32 nm and 20 nm was "limited". Scaling challenges include a decreasing reliability of the chips.

Infineon's announcement can be seen as sign that the industry is confident about scaling Flash and defending the memory's position as popular storage technologies beyond the year 2008. Because of its lower production cost, Flask is likely to continue its dominance in the market, until a natural barrier of scaling opportunities is reached and the industry will have to shift to reinvent production processes.

Source: Tom's Hardware Guide

mmonnin

Keep making them smaller with more space because Seagate is going to make tiny hard drives inside a ComplactFlash device storing 2.5 or 5GB of stuff.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/seagate-st1-5gb.html

MountainDew

will those mini hard drives be damaged when dropped like normal-sized drives? cuz i feel much safer dropping a flash drive with no moving parts.

mmonnin

It did say they made extra protection since its not a normal Flash Drive:

This technology allows to detect inappropriate harmonic frequencies and to compensate them by automatically forcing the heads to stay on the tracks. It is also important to prevent the drive from failing in case of an unexpected external shock, such as when the device falls down on the floor, for instance, because in this case the heads can hit against the platter surface really hard and thus damage the surface. In order to ensure this will not happen, Seagate implemented their G-Force Protection technology in these ST1 drives, too. The idea behind this technology is that the heads get automatically removed from the platter surface once the HDD is shut down, which reduces the risk of accidental damage to the minimum.