Why do I feel I've sat through...
Yet another buzzword bingo sales meeting.
All we needed was a power point presentation to top it off.
Anyone who’s ever watched the original Star Trek series will probably remember Spock and Kirk playing three-dimensional chess – a great chance for the Enterprise’s science officer to show off his prowess with logic as he contemplated a range of complex moves. It’s that same complexity that underlines one of the hottest …
Maybe, but 3D NAND really is a major breakthrough. It's a win-win, because not only does it increase chip memory capacity, it allows the NAND cell size to be much larger, which increases reliability and endurance (strange this wasn't mentioned in the article).
Maybe, but 3D NAND really is a major breakthrough.
Really? Given that we already have multi-layer flash, this article makes it sound just like more of the same. Think Manhattan and the Empire State as compared to the Woolworth building: similar technology but more tiers.
The other problem that's going to get worse is heat removal. I'm a little surprised the article didn't put that on the table too.
It's bad enough in 2D as devices shrink and more and more are crammed into a given physical area, but when they are stacked there's even less path for heat to be lost. And if things get too warm, over time stuff starts migrating and generally the functionality of the parts of the die (the transistors and capacitors mainly, but not exclusively) degrade or even fail.
As capacity (and so density) increases, that's only going to get worse until some more active solution to remove the heat is required. Or another change of materials to make the switching more efficient and so not generate as much heat in the first place...
Ok, and I have to ask... just how toxic are the byproducts from manufacturing these chips?
(Granted we're not talking about Uranium Hexaflouride...)
I mean should these companies worry about having to notify customers of the potential toxic nature of these materials? (Under California law, everything is toxic these days)
Whats the cost benefit between 3D NAND and TSV chiplets?
Obviously, there’s a huge win from 2D NAND up to say 128 layer. But there must come a point where the cost of putting down each layer contributes most of the total cost, and then the price of the chip just scales linearly with number of layers. At that point, why not just make say 128-layer chiplets and stack them on top of each other using TSV or interposer technology, as high as you want, like Hybrid Memory Cube?
Anybody know where the limit of this might be?
Many people roundly mocked the late Jerry Pournelle when, in the late 1980's, he proclaimed that in the future semiconductor storage would supplant rotating rust. Seems though that he may have been right. 3D NAND looks like it'll meet or beat spinning rust on capacity, and if the price goes down, spinning rust is likely dust.