Two major draws of using an SSD for storage are low power consumption and high write speeds. Researchers in Japan have ensured they will remain the two major benefits of flash memory as they have just significantly cut power use and boosted write speeds for a new type of NAND flash.
The research group, working out of the University of Tokyo, claims to have cut power use by as much as 86% over existing flash memory. They did this by using ferroelectric NAND which uses an alternative ferroelectric insulating film and metal gate rather than the floating gate structure seen in NAND flash memory commonly used today. By making this switch the voltage can be cut from 20V to 6V for the main circuitry in a solid-state drive.
Lower voltage means lower power consumption with an SSD requiring only 1V while retaining reliability (existing flash memory uses 1.8V). Attempting the same with existing flash memory results in more work by the core circuitry which increases power consumption and is therefore pointless.
Another advantage to this new memory is the number of NAND chips that can be written to in parallel also increasing significantly. Keeping power consumption at 1.5W drives can currently write to 16 NAND chips in parallel. With the new memory, and the same power consumption, that increases to 110 NAND chips in parallel. This in turn translates to write speeds of up to 9.5GB/s.
The development of the new chip also meant creating a new write method called Single-cell Self-boost method. It solves the problem of writing the data to the wrong cell at very low voltages by turning off specific cells and preventing write disturb problems.
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The future already looked bright for SSD storage, but with new developments like this the switch from typical hard drive storage to SSD will only gain pace.
You expect researchers to increase speed, or cut power use, but never both at the same time and to such a great extent. These new NAND chips could lead to near instant boot PCs and batteries that last longer between charges in your laptop.
There’s no details as to when we can expect to see these new NAND chips appear on the market just yet. The research group made the public announcement at the IEEE 2nd International Memory Workshop over the weekend meaning it won’t take long for a storage company to pick this tech up and run with it.