

Why Flash Drive Density Will Stop Growing Next Year - edw519
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/article.php/3904146/Why-Flash-Drive-Density-Will-Stop-Growing-Next-Year.htm

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proee
This is linkbait with some technical jargon thrown in. The companies behind
SSD technology - Samsung, Micron, IBM, Intel, etc are not sitting on their
duffs waiting for the limits of their design to hit.

People have been claiming the end of DRAMs for years because the size of the
storage cell (capacitor) does not scale well with the bitlines, etc.

There has been a bottleneck though in the speed of processors because of
simple power consumption - that's when we switched to multicore processors.
However, i think the overall computational power has been keeping track with
moores law.

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gamble
The consensus today is that traditional semiconductor scaling is going to get
iffy below 22nm for most devices. Flash is going to hit that limit first,
because it's on the leading edge with component densities doubling every 12
months or so. No one knows what's going to happen at that point, but it seems
like the most attractive option is 3D integration - building up, rather than
out. All of today's chips consist of a single plane of transistors, connected
by layers of metal wiring. It's possible to build multiple layers of
transistors, but there are serious fabrication issues that haven't been solved
yet.

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Devilboy
I don't know where you got that from, do you have any sources? The 2009
edition ITRS concluded that there's no significant remaining roadblocks for
22nm processes. They listed some challenges for 16nm but they do expect to
overcome all these obstacles in time to keep Moore's law going for at least
another 5 years. No manufacturer that I know of have said that 22nm is going
to be a limit. In fact Taiwanese researchers have already produced a 16nm SRAM
chip in Dec 2009:

[http://www.taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xitem=87144&CtNode=416](http://www.taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xitem=87144&CtNode=416)

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gamble
I said it will get _difficult_ below 22nm, not that 22nm was itself a limit.
Moore's law isn't going to end at a discrete point. What will happen is that
each generation will become progressively more difficult to put into
production, until alternatives like 3d integration are more practical. We're
already seeing some of that with 45nm and 32nm, but sub-22nm is going to be
very challenging.

My source is also the ITRS.

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teilo
I've heard this all before, only about hard drive density, quite a number of
times. They were always wrong, even as they are wrong now about flash memory.

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kbatten
So basically the article boils down to "it will cost more money to increase
density".

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ZhuHan
If that's true, SSD will remain as the L2 cache device in the next few years.
Does spindle media have theoretical limit of density?

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wmf
Hard disks are getting close to the limit of perpendicular recording and will
have to adopt HAMR or BPM. At least the disk vendors are used to big
technology changes; AFAIK flash has been using the same floating gate cell all
along.

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mikeklaas
That's okay--a 1tb hdd backed by a 128gb ssd page cache should be almost as
good as 1tb of ssd for desktops and laptops.

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sliverstorm
how about "because your customers can't think of a use for flash drives over
16GB"

