A new, high-speed NAND flash-memory technology, released today by Intel and Micron Technology, could propel the use of solid-state storage in video cameras, PCs and other devices.
The technology enables data transfer as much as five times faster than conventional NAND. It was developed jointly by the companies, and is being manufactured by their joint venture, IM Flash Technologies. The announced speeds are up to 200 megabytes per second for reading data, and 100 megabytes per second for writing.
Regular NAND offers speeds of up to 40 megabytes per second for reading and up to 20 megabytes for writing. Micron said the new speeds are “the fastest read and write throughputs ever for a NAND flash device.”
Supports New ONFI 2.0 Spec
According to the companies, the technology accomplishes these speeds through a four-plane architecture with higher clock speeds. It is designed for use with the new Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group (ONFI) 2.0 specification, as well as the previous 1.0 spec. Intel and Micron said this allows both backward compatibility and forward-looking designs. The recently released 2.0 spec provides for a high-speed, standard NAND flash-memory interface with higher performance and shorter development cycles.
“Think of a NAND chip as a football field,” advised Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds. The companies are now cutting the field into four sections, he said, which reduces travel distance and increases speed. The speed improvement, he added, will help NAND memory be competitive with hard drives if the user only needs relatively small capacities.
Pete Hazen, marketing director of the Intel NAND Product Group, said the technology “will enable new embedded solutions and removable solutions that take advantage of high-performance system interfaces,” such as USB 3.0. The USB 3.0 specification provides for as much as 10 times the bandwidth of current USB 2.0, at about 4.8 gigabits per second.
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