SemiSerious

For years the question, “How much is enough?” has been debated regarding NAND flash endurance. How many write cycles do you really need over the lifetime of a camera card or memory stick? How long do you need your portable data to stay intact?

SI’s senior memory analyst, Young Choi, attended the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara to hear what the vendors are saying about solid-state drives, or SSD’s. As NAND flash prepares to reach out and grab a chunk of the hard disk drive market, it will face even more scrutiny as we will all demand more endurance from the SSD’s that are just beginning to show up in select computers. As Young noted, “The overall impression is that the market is still in its infancy and it will take quite a while before enterprises and consumers adopt systems with SSDs.” And that was certainly the view of Fujitsu who cautiously observed, “the market and consumer are not happy about SSD overall.”

Participants were focused on three areas – performance, endurance and price. Many experts are calling for standardization of SSD performance metrics to eliminate the current state of confusion over SSD performance metrics. That would help avoid the “benchmarketing” we are often forced to suffer in this industry.

When I mentioned the NAND flash endurance debates of the past, I was alluding to the MLC versus SLC wars that have been waged over the years (often with Toshiba and Samsung as the respective combatants). The key information returned from the Summit was based on a usage model of 20GB per day for the typical consumer. This means that MLC NAND flash could provide sufficient lifetimes for consumer SSD products.

Several summit participants tried to predict the future of the SSD market by comparing it to the HDD market of long ago. Expect some major rounds of consolidation considering that there are more than 70 SSD manufacturers today.

But it seems like there is more driving SSD technology than simple bits and drive endurance. There is a shade of green overtaking the SSD conversation. Yes, saving energy and “going green” is a big part of the talk about SSD’s. At the Summit, the local California utility, PG&E, promoted the need to reduce energy demands through technological innovation. Their example was the power consumed by large data centers which can be reduced by transitioning to SSD.

Young mentioned that Intel will have some interesting things to discuss at the Intel Developer Forum August 19 through 21. Intel may concentrate on the controller for SSD, and this may actually be the key component to making NAND work in the SSD. The way operating systems use the hard disk is really tough on flash. For robust SSD’s in our future laptops, we will be relying on Intel and others to implement intelligent control and management of which physical memory locations are used to even out the wear over the whole flash chip over the life of the product. SanDisk has proposed their own version that they are calling LDE or Long Term Data Endurance.

David Manners recently reported in Electronics Weekly that the semiconductor materials market will grow at double the rate of the chip industry. The actual numbers quoted from the SIA and SEMI respectively shake out as 4% for semiconductors and 9% for materials. It all sounds like solid growth – right?

Or does it? I fear that some solid-sounding numbers might be exploited to make things sound good when we might be headed for more trouble down the road. Where will the increase in tools and materials spending lead? Manners wisely attributed the more than double growth rate for materials to the combination of a rise in unit IC shipments coupled with a “steep decline in ASP…besetting the chip industry.”

Maybe I need to sign up for that remedial MBA program because I just don’t get it. What’s going to happen if the fabs’ spending rate on materials is increasing more than twice as fast as the revenues they get from the chips they manufacture?

After my longest absence since starting SemiSerious, I thought it was about time to get posting again. For the handful of people actually reading this blog, I feel terrible about not keeping it going through the early summer. I hope to ramp up again in August with weekly posts appearing regularly by the time September rolls around.

Unfortunately, I have nothing semiconductor-related to post today. Instead, I thought I would just give an update on where I’ve been. My father passed away in June. After travelling back to Saskatchewan with my wife and two daughters for the funeral and other things, we took an extended family vacation. It just seemed like the right time for the kids to be with their maternal grandparents.

Now that I think of it, maybe a post about Dad is connected to semiconductors. I guess you could say he was there on the ground as consumer products transitioned to solid-state technology. Around the time I was born in the mid-sixties, my father was off work from the seed cleaning plant because of a workplace injury. He decided to use his unproductive time to enroll in a home self-study course in electronics – radio and television technology and repair. That led to a moonlighting business fixing TV’s (in our basement), then to a job at the local electronic parts distibutor, and eventually to his owning and operating that same parts business.

It was watching Dad in the shop that ignited my own interest in electronics. He always enjoyed having his kids around, so there were lots of opporunities to see him working. Dad taught me the resistor color code and Ohm’s Law.

In a lot of ways, it was difficult for Dad to watch the industry migrate from vacuum tubes to semiconductors. He was fascinated by the transistor and the IC, but the ever-decreasing cost of electronic products unsettled him. Cheaper TV’s meant fewer would ever be repaired. But it was not just about the loss of business for himself and his colleagues. It meant that more things were just thrown away and piled up in landfills.

My Dad was born in Southern Saskatchewan to immigrant parents (first generation North Dakotans) and spoke only Norwegian until picking up English at school where he completed the eigth grade. He was 83.