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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @07:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the 256k-should-be-enough-for-anybody dept.

Toshiba has showed off a NAND flash device using through-silicon vias (TSVs) to stack 16 NAND dies, a technology it announced earlier this month. From Tom's Hardware:

TSV technology removed the wire bonding from the edges of the die. Instead, the signal is passed through the entire stack vertically. Vertical NAND, often referred to as V-NAND or 3D NAND, differs from TSV, though. Nothing leads us to believe that the two technologies can't work together, but at this time we are unaware of any designs that merge the two technologies.

[...] Toshiba's partners are excited about this product for two reasons: The first is performance. PMC Sierra makes very high-performing NVMe SSDs that move the bottleneck from the PCIe interface to the flash itself. The Princeton controller uses 32 channels to address a large number of flash die and is a very expensive controller to manufacture. If the company is able to reach the same performance level with just 16 channels, the overall cost will drop. The capacity can remain the same because TSV allows Toshiba to stack twice the number of die in each package.

Performance is only one aspect of the overall datacenter equation, though. The upfront costs are minimal compared to the long term costs due to power consumption. PMC Sierra demonstrated a very wide gap in power efficiency between non-TSV Toggle mode flash and new TSV Toggle mode flash.

The use of TSV could help scale NAND capacity in the vertical dimension even further.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Wikibon Predicts All-Flash Arrays Will be Cheaper Than Disk In a Decade 14 comments

The Platform reports on forecasts by the analysts at Wikibon predicting that flash arrays will be cheaper than disk arrays within a decade and replace them in enterprise datacenters:

[Wikibon CTO David] Floyer's thinking is outlined in a new report, Enterprise Flash vs. HDD Projections 2012-2026, which just came out, and it is unabashedly aggressive in forecasting the demise of the disk drive in the datacenter for tier one (or primary) storage. Even as incumbent disk array makers peddle hybrid machines mixing disk and flash and trot out all-flash arrays to compete with the myriad – and often well-funded – upstarts, most of the vendors say again and again that they expect to see disk drives in the datacenter for the foreseeable future. To his credit, Floyer put a stake in the ground – and into the disk drive.

There is a lot going on underneath that seemingly simple chart above. The blue area shows the spending on flash storage among both enterprises and hyperscalers added together over the forecast period, and it shows it rising from a mere $490 million in 2012 to $2.54 billion last year, to $4.55 billion this year and $7.54 billion in 2016. The growth doesn't just stop there, though – it accelerates as the cost per TB of flash storage is predicted to come way down over the next decade. At the array level, flash cost something on the order of $20,000 per TB three years ago, according to Floyer's model, and will drop to $4,320 per TB this year. The cost of disk capacity in all-disk or hybrid arrays is still coming down, oddly enough, dropping from $2,268 per TB in 2012 to $1,070 per TB this year. So, flash is still around 4X the cost of disk, give or take. But that is only on traditional arrays. When you weave enterprise server SANs and hyperscale server SANs into the model – inexpensive and often clustered servers with beefed up storage capability – prices really come down. An all-flash server SAN costs about $672 per TB this year, says Floyer, and an all-disk server SAN will run a piddling $87 per TB.

By the end of the forecast period in 2026, the cost of flash in either hybrid or all-flash arrays will be about $16 per TB, compared to $26 per TB for disks in all-disk or hybrid arrays. You read that right, disks will be more expensive than flash, and the crossover will come in 2023 in Floyer's model within hybrid or all-media arrays. Server SANs, whether based on disk or flash, will continue to be much cheaper than arrays with their fancy controllers and architectures, although the gap gets pretty small by the time 2026 rolls around. Disks will be slightly cheaper in Server SANs than flash for a reason that we wish Floyer would explain.

Samsung recently unveiled a 15.36 TB 2.5" SSD, and through-silicon vias may be able to be combined with vertical NAND to boost capacity, capacity per dollar, and reduce operating expenses.


Original Submission

Toshiba Teasing QLC 3D NAND and TSV for More Layers

The wide adoption of 3D/vertical NAND with increased feature sizes and endurance will apparently lead to the introduction of low-cost QLC (4 bits per cell) NAND. 3D NAND's increased flash cell size and overprovisioning will counteract the reduction in endurance caused by moving from 3 to 4 bits per cell:

We covered the TSV [Through Silicon Vias] notion here and now take a look at quadruple level cell (QLC) flash technology. Toshiba will present on this and TSVs in a keynote session at the August 6-9 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. The session abstract notes: "New technologies such as QLC (Quadruple Level Cell) BiCS FLASH offer high density, low-cost solutions, while TSV (Through Silicon Via) NAND offers high performance with significant power reduction."

To recap, BiCS stands for Bit Cost Scalable and is Toshiba and flash foundry partner WDC's approach to 3D NAND, the layering of ordinary or planer (2D) NAND chips atop each other. We have 48-layer cells in production and 64-layer ones coming with 96-layer and even 128-layer chips in prospect. Progress beyond 64-layers has problems due to the difficulties in etching holes through the layers and so the TSV idea is to have two layers of layering: two 64-layer chips one on top of the other, with holes through them both, TSVs, for wiring to hold them together and carry out cell activity functions as well.

[...] Back in March, Jeff Ohshima, a Toshiba executive, presented on TSVs and QLC flash at the Non-Volatile Memory Workshop and suggested 88TB QLC 3D NAND SSDs with a 500 write cycle life could be put into production. The Flash Memory Summit keynote could add more colour to this.

Related:

Toshiba and SanDisk Announce 48-Layer 256 Gb 3D NAND
Toshiba Brings Through-Silicon Vias to NAND Flash
Western Digital, SanDisk, and the NAND Market
"String-Stacking" Being Developed to Enable 3D NAND With More Than 100 Layers (NAND devices with 64 layers and above will be difficult to create, so stacking 48-layer devices will be used to increase density)


Original Submission

Toshiba Develops 512 GB and 1 TB Flash Chips Using TSV 9 comments

While other manufacturers are making 512 Gb to 1 Tb 3D NAND flash dies, Toshiba is using through-silicon vias (TSVs) to stack their dies, effectively cramming 384 to 768 layers of 3D NAND into a single chip. Toshiba announced that it was developing this capability back in 2015, and now the first products to use it will be available in 2018:

Toshiba on Wednesday introduced its first BiCS 3D TLC NAND flash chips with 512 GB and 1 TB capacities. . The new ICs stack 8 or 16 3D NAND devices using through silicon vias (TSVs) and are currently among the highest capacity non-volatile memory stacks available in the industry. Commercial products powered by the 512 GB and 1 TB packages are expected to hit the market in 2018, with an initial market focus on high-end enterprise SSDs

Stacking NAND devices to build high capacity flash memory ICs has been used for years to maximize the capacities and performance of SSDs and other solid state storage devices. In many cases, NAND makers use wire-bonding technique to stack multiple memory devices, but it makes packages larger and requires a lot of power for reliable operation. However in more recent years, Toshiba has adopted TSV techniques previously used for ASIC and DRAM devices to stack its NAND ICs, which has enabled it to shrink size of its NAND packages and reduce their power consumption.

TSVs are essentially electrodes that penetrate the entire thickness of a silicon die and connect the dies above and below it in the stack. A bus formed by TSVs can operate at a high data transfer rate, consume less power, and take up less space than a bus made using physical wires. Since 3D NAND is based on vertically stacked memory layers and has numerous vertical interconnects, so far Toshiba has not used TSVs to interconnect such devices. To wed TSV and 3D NAND, Toshiba had to develop a special 512 Gb BiCS NAND die featuring appropriate electrical conductors.

The devices both measure 14 mm × 18 mm. The 8-stack chip has a height of 1.35 mm, and the 16-stack chip has a height of 1.85 mm.

Toshiba press release.

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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:12AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:12AM (#224301) Homepage
    "flash die" - if that is being used as a plural, does that mean that "flash dice" must be the singular? How many sides does a flash dice have?

    "scale NAND capacity in the vertical dimension" - NAND capacity is either dimensionless (a raw number), or has the pseudo-dimension "bits" (compare "moles"). Neither of those options is spacial, so has no concept of horizontal versus vertical expansion. An increase in a spacial dimension wouldn't be useful, either, as real progress is made by increasing densities (such that the same capacity takes up less of a spacial dimension).

    And as a cherry on top, "PMC Sierra demonstrated a very wide gap in power efficiency". So, which way? Is the new tech 100 times worse? And how wide is wide? When judging a touching ball in snooker, a distance of 1000-th of the size of the table would be considered a very wide gap (you'd not even need to call the umpire, as it would be so obvious). So even if we're presuming the unstated, and that it's an improvement, is it a 10% improvement or a 10x improvement. Was the article writer's intention to actually communicate anything useful?
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:42AM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:42AM (#224312) Homepage

      die n. a device for cutting or molding metal into a particular shape

      As for the rest, you'll have to synergise your blue-sky thinking to see that they've leveraged a whole new paradigm when it comes to enveloping the rhinoceros sandwich.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:11PM

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:11PM (#224375) Homepage
        Your "die" has plural "dies", though.

        However, you're right, I'll start synergising rhinoceros 2.0, don't forget 2.0, erm, beta, right away.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:19PM

        by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:19PM (#224378) Homepage

        Yeah, yeah, that's not even the right definition of die for the context...

        --
        systemd is Roko's Basilisk
        • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:07PM

          by Freeman (732) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:07PM (#224486) Journal

          In this case they are talking about the actual chip / die. https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/integrated-circuits/ [sparkfun.com] Interesting read that tells you what they mean by the word "die" in this context.

          --
          Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:52AM

      by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:52AM (#224322) Journal

      My question would be...other than enterprise data cruncher workstations and servers who is gonna need this? Because I've found a standard SSD on SATA already goes faster than the average user can and its a hell of a lot cheaper. I recently upgraded the wife's PC with an SSD and even with her Phenom II system only having SATA-3 it still goes from pushing the button to ready to go in under 20 seconds and even large games like World Of Warships loads faster than she can even read what the objective is, and on my PC with SATA-6 the OS is ready to go literally before I am.

      So I'm starting to have the feeling that SSDs are gonna run into the same problems PCs have, in that the technology keeps on advancing while the jobs the users have to do simply cannot keep up. If anything all the average users really need is more space at a cheaper price as the speed of current SSDs, even the cheap ones has just gotten unreal.

      --
      ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:05PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:05PM (#224372)

        Yes, because enterprise technology never makes its way down to consumer products.

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:13PM

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:13PM (#224377) Homepage
        Never underestimate the amount of bloat that can be added in order to make blindingly fast technology slow.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:39PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:39PM (#224385) Journal

        I've got another story about NAND coming for you later.

        Here is a sneak preview:

        https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=9016 [soylentnews.org]
        http://www.theplatform.net/2015/08/17/in-a-decade-disk-is-dead-for-tier-one-storage/ [theplatform.net]

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:03AM

          by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:03AM (#224778) Journal

          This is one area where I have to call BS, as the size of data from camera and video just keeps growing and growing at a pace that the SSDs just don't match, at least not at a price point Joe Average will pay. The way my customers have been going is the way I think computers will be going, with an SSD and a HDD on the desktop and an SSD with an external HDD on the laptop. This way they get the bulk storage all those pics and vids and shows and tunes require without having to spend insane-o money on a Tb SSD. Also never forget that RAM trumps all, no SSD comes close to the speed of RAM and with the price dropping like crazy on RAM its quite easy to build a system where the OS doesn't touch the drives once its booted.

          Will there be people that go all SSD? Sure such as those that don't give a single fuck about privacy, they'll probably just use the Win 10 OneDrive to store all their docs and pics and call it a day, but I have a feeling most folks will end up with both, as HDDs give you the space while SSDs give you the speed. Maybe Toshiba or Seagate will do what I thought should have been obvious 2 years ago, build a hybrid with 128GB-256Gb of SSD with a 3TB HDD so the OS and programs can be SSD while the data can be HDD but until that happens I'll keep advising my customers that having both is the best course.

          --
          ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:00AM (#224313)

    What's "vias"?