Samsung Electronics has begun mass production of a 16 Gbyte NAND flash memory chip that would be used in digital music players, music phones, and digital cameras. Samsung, which is making the chips using a 51-nanometer manufacturing process, said it is the first to mass-produce what it claims is the "highest capacity memory chip now available. In rolling out the densest NAND flash in the world, we are throwing open the gates to a much wider playing field for flash-driven consumer electronics," Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing for Samsung Semiconductor, said in a statement issued Sunday.
Samsung said its 51-nanometer production process can make NAND flash chips 60% more efficiently than the typical 60-nanometer process used in the industry. In addition, the new production process accelerates the read-write speeds by about 80% over current data processing speeds for comparable chip designs. Samsung plans to integrate the chip with a suite of Flash software and firmware for storage devices for music phones and MP3 players. As the demand for video content grows, Samsung expects to promote the chip for storage in mid- to high-range digital cameras. The company expects the high-capacity chip to enter the mainstream market beginning late this year.
The latest product follows by about eight months Samsung's launch of production of a 60-nanometer 8-Gbyte NAND flash memory chip. Samsung has been pushing the envelope in flash technology. In March, the company introduced a 64 Gbyte solid-state flash drive for ultra-portable notebooks. The South Korean company unveiled the 1.8-inch drive at its annual Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, Taiwan, and said it planned to start mass production in the second quarter.
For someone who remembers ferrite core memory planes, 16Gb on a single chip is simply stupendous. Were it not for the advent of digital photography and music downloads, a single one of these chips could probably hold every single document, spreadsheet and digital record that the average household would produce in a human lifetime. I can still remember the first chip memory devices. A Texas Instruments catalog that I taught myself digital electronics out of proudly announced a 16 bit register file which could simultaneously read and write. Later whopping 1K serial DRAMs came to market and it's been upwards and onwards ever since.
While I was working during the late 1970s with Tegal Corporation to develop plasma etching and deposition chemistries, the buzz was all about integrated citcuits made with micron (1 millionth or 0.000001 Meter) and sub-micron line widths. The Samsung device is now utilizing 60nM (60 nanometer or billionths of a meter) for its line widths. Thats 0.000000060 of a meter wide. By comparison a human hair ranges from 0.000180 to 0.000018 of a meter in diameter (18 to 180 microns).
During the mid-1980s I worked at Intel performing yield analysis for their stupendous 256K C-MOS DRAM. The largest of its kind at that time, it represented a huge leap ahead (despite other larger memory chips), due to C-MOS's low power consumption. This important property increased battery lifetimes then, as now, a major limiting factor in overall performance. To give an understanding of how small the memory cells were in the 256K DRAM chip, we had to switch over to an ultralow contaminant molding compound for encapsulating the chips because it was found that stray radioactive boron in the plastic's glass reinforcing fibers were emitting alpha particles which carried enough charge to flip the individual memory bit cells and create soft errors in the stored data.
Much as the hard drive's technological demise has been predicted over and over again, so has that of silicon technology. Especially the fabrication method known as photolithography. It is identical to the process whereby the copper layer of printed circuit boards is patterned using a photo-sensitive resist, only the scale is incredibly smaller. During the micron line width days of silicon, ordinary light was used to expose the photoresists employed in photolithography. As the linewidths increasingly approached the actual wavelength of light, scattering and reflectance notching all begin to interfere with accurate replication of the masking image being projected onto the wafer.
New approaches using E-Beam (electron beam) and other ultra-narrow beam technologies were developed to circumvent this issue. Remarkably enough, just like the disk drive, which continues to amaze everyone with its longevity, so has photolithography been given new life through the use of Deep UV (Ultra Violet) illumination for developing the resist patterns. It is most likely what Samsung is using to fabricate these little wonders and I am obliged to congratulate them for this achievement. I still have to wonder if they are depositing tungsten conductor layers for this chip using the CVD reactors I used to work on for one of their OEM suppliers.