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Toshiba Brings Through-Silicon Vias to NAND Flash

Accepted submission by takyon at 2015-08-17 20:58:02
Hardware

Toshiba has showed off [anandtech.com] a NAND flash device using through-silicon vias (TSVs) to stack NAND dies [tomshardware.com], a technology it announced earlier this month [reuters.com]. 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.


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