Intel and Micron Develop NAND Flash Memory with 5X Faster Performance
To be manufactured by NAND flash joint venture IM Flash Technologies
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on February 4, 2008 at 4:19 pmIntel Corporation
and Micron Technology Inc. unveiled a high speed NAND flash
memory technology that can greatly enhance the access and transfer of
data in devices that use silicon for storage. The new technology –
developed jointly by Intel and Micron and manufactured by the
companies’ NAND flash joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) – is
five times faster than conventional NAND, allowing data to be
transferred in a fraction of the time for computing, video, photography
and other computing applications.
The new high speed NAND can reach speeds up to 200 megabytes per second
(MB/s) for reading data and 100 MB/s for writing data, achieved by
leveraging the new ONFI 2.0 specification and a four-plane architecture
with higher clock speeds. In comparison, conventional single level cell
NAND is limited to 40 MB/s for reading data and less than 20 MB/s for
writing data.
“Micron looks forward to unlocking the possibilities with high speed
NAND,” said Frankie Roohparvar, Micron vice president of NAND
development. “We are working with an ecosystem of key enablers and
partners to build and optimize corresponding system technologies that
take advantage of its improved performance capabilities. Micron is
committed to NAND innovation and designing new features into the
technology that create a powerful data storage solution for today’s
most popular consumer electronic and computing devices.”
“The computing market is embracing NAND-based solutions to accelerate
system performance through the use of caching and solid-state drives,”
said Pete Hazen, director of marketing, Intel NAND Products Group. “At
up to five times the performance over conventional NAND, the high speed
NAND from Intel and Micron, based on the ONFi 2.0 industry standard,
will enable new embedded solutions and removable solutions that take
advantage of high–performance system interfaces, including PCIe and
upcoming standards such as USB 3.0.”
The specific performance advantages of high speed NAND in today’s most popular devices include:
- When used in a hybrid hard drive, high speed NAND can allow
the system to read and write data anywhere between two or four times
the speed when compared to conventional hard drives. - With
the popularity of digital video cameras and video on demand services,
high speed NAND can enable a high-definition movie to be transferred
five times faster than conventional NAND. - With the pending
USB 3.0 interface, high speed NAND is expected to effectively deliver
on the increased data transfer rates of the new specification, where
conventional NAND would act as the bottleneck in system performance.
USB 3.0 is aiming for 10 times the bandwidth of current USB 2.0
solutions, or approximately achieving 4.8 gigabits per second. - As
NAND continues to move into the PC platform, the Non-Volatile Memory
Host Controller Interface (NVMHCI) can take advantage of high speed
NAND in solutions such as Intel® Turbo Memory, allowing for even better
system performance. NVMHCI is designed to provide a standard software
programming interface allowing operating system drivers to access NAND
flash memory storage in applications such as hard drive caching and
solid-state drives.