1PB, or 1000TBs seems like a crazy amount of storage given that it takes an average user so many files, contents, games, whatever to fill up just a couple of TBs but the goal of inventing increasingly denser flash chips never stopped, as Samsung’s recent movement signifies possible advancement.
Citing a follow-up post by TweakTown, the Korean giant will be shipping products packed with its 9th Gen V-NAND flash that packs 290 layers which are already industry-leading at this point. However, they also announced the official engagement of next-gen which is 10th Gen that cramps even more layers at 430.
That sort of possibility can be hinted at by one of the latest to-be-presented papers led by one Ph.D student Giwuk Kim from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)’s Department of Electrical Engineering, who is going to talk about Hafnia Ferroelectrics and various analysis that points to applications of smaller and more efficient capacitors and thus memory chips.
How does that have anything to do with Samsung? Well, Samsung Electronics is co-authoring that work but the rest of the details are quite obscured, be it the level of involvement, potential of future funding, etc. But we do have the paper’s title – “In-depth Analysis of the Hafnia Ferroelectrics as a Key Enabler for Low Voltage & QLC 3D VNAND Beyond 1K Layer Experimental Demonstration and Modeling”
Here’s a quick summary of the research.
“We experimentally demonstrate a remarkable performance improvement, boosted by the interaction of charge trapping & ferroelectric (FE) switching effects in metal-band engineered gate interlayer (BE-G.IL)-FE-channel interlayer (Ch.IL)-Si (MIFIS) FeFET. The MIFIS with BE-G.IL (BE-MIFIS) facilitates the maximized ‘positive feedback’ (Posi. FB.) of dual effects, leading to low operation voltage (VPGM/VERS: +17/-15 V), a wide memory window (MW: 10.5 V) and negligible disturb at a biased voltage of 9 V.
Furthermore, our proposed model verifies that the performance enhancement of the BE-MIFIS FeFET is attributed to the intensified posi. FB. This work proves that the hafnia FE can play as a key enabler in extending the technology development of 3D VNAND, which is currently approaching a state of stagnation.”
Although the technology that made this possible would be inevitably created as always, bleeding edge manufacturing and early low yield rates are going to drive the price high so it will most likely debut for enterprise SSDs first and then stream its way down to the consumer level.
