

Samsung Starts Mass Producing Industry’s First 3D Vertical NAND Flash - jsnk
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/news-events/press-releases/detail?newsId=12990

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burke
Heat dissipation and manufacturing concerns aside, a 3D stacked architecture
seems to be the most obvious thing to increase clock speeds. Light can only
travel about 30cm every nanosecond: components clocked at 4GHz can't be more
than 7.5cm apart from each other (I think -- and probably have to be quite a
bit less for practical concerns). Packing everything vertically makes it
easier to keep these propagation delays low and drive up clock speeds.

We seem to be in a race to the smallest transistor physically possible, to
increase density on 2D chips. Tiny transistors generally leak more heat due to
quantum tunnelling, right? So what if the industry moved toward much, much
more efficient, larger transistors, layered hundreds or thousands of layers
thick in a large 3D architecture? I think the only reason this isn't happening
is because it's not really possible to manufacture that sort of chip without
it taking a thousand times as long and being a thousand times as likely to
fail QA -- but maybe this is a step in that direction.

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svantana
Well there is quantum tunneling but there is also dennard scaling, so it goes
both ways. Transistors need to be small but also non-leaky, so that's why
everyone's toying around with exotic materials and structures.

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VladRussian2
not being a chip engineer, i wonder while 3D chip layer stacking isn't in the
wide use. For high powered chips it is understandable because of heat
dissipation requirements. Whereis for lower powered it may seem that
additional layers of heat transfer material between working layers would do
the trick. For CPUs the 3D stacking would decrease distances between various
parts for example and would allow something like cluster (of low powered
chips) in a cube.

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jlgreco
For low power chips, what advantages would there be for stacking? My thought
is that low power chips probably aren't going for performance (since they are
low power), so stacking for performance wouldn't really be buying them
anything necessary. Maybe you could just get smaller form-factor low power
chips.

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VladRussian2
half of motivation for 3D i see is the model of the brain, not the actual
geometry of the brain, which is about 2D+ (don't remember the fractal
dimension value of the brain), more a logical model of it where computational
power comes from having number of connection an order of magnitude larger than
number of connected neurons. Our current electronics has it backwards - number
of connection is orders of magnitude less than number of connected elements.
3D seems like a way to build computational devices with increased number of
connections (that though requires some work on software side as well to
benefit from it)

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ChuckMcM
Pretty amazing hack to get around the size limitations of NAND flash feature
size.

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rwallace
The article mentions 10nm process size, whereas I thought the current state-
of-the-art was 20nm. Is flash memory an exception? And if so, does that also
apply to DRAM? Or am I just confused?

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makomk
Flash and DRAM have highly regular structures, which means they tend to be
ahead of everything else in terms of feature size (and also, feature size
isn't an exact measurement anyway).

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BariumBlue
>128 gigabit (Gb) [per chip]

This is the first I think I've seen size measured in gigabits, rather than
gigabytes, of which there'd be 16, which is still impressive, but on amazon I
can buy a 32GB sdcard for $20.

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mvgoogler
Flash chips are typically spec'd in terms of bits in the industry.

Things like SD cards are really small consumer electronics devices and are
spec'd in terms of bytes.

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kenster07
This is incredible and may have far reaching implications for computing.

Hopefully, the cost ratios haven't disproportionately increased as well.

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ihsw
I wonder how long it'll take for Apple to violate Samsung's patents, when
product bans will be proposed, and when those bans get overturned.

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wtallis
That's not funny. This isn't the market where Apple and Samsung compete, it's
the market where Apple is a huge Samsung customer, where a few years ago Apple
was responsible for an outright _majority_ of Samsung's sales.

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revelation
Samsung is a gigantic company, a South Korean Siemens. They are active in any
number of markets, and Apple certainly didn't provide for a majority of their
sales.

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wtallis
Read my comment again. I wasn't making any statements about the Samsung
conglomerate as a whole. I was only discussing the flash memory market, and in
that market, Apple was indeed responsible at one time for purchasing more than
50% of Samsung's production of flash memory (this was during the heyday of the
iPod Nano and prior to mainstream SATA SSDs).

