August 10, 2011 - San Jose, CA - San Disk took some time to overview their product growth strategies for the flash marketplace. The two major areas of growth are with embedded flash and SSDs.
We had a chance to discuss the Embedded Flash marketplace with Gadi Ben-Gad of SanDisk for memory that is used in mobile phones, embedded devices and some tablets that are super-sized smart phones. The dominant interface is eMMC and is a direct product that has the Flash memory, the controller and the package as a single integrated unit.
The cost performance tradeoff has to do with the application base that the system uses the memory for. The price side runs from low price for small applications, light multi-tasking, and simple displays to high for supprting large applications, heavy multi-tasking and high resolution graphics for the display. SanDisk has 3 product families that support this range - iNAND, iNANDUltra and iNANDExtreme. The iNAND product features a standard 15Mb/s write and is for small data sets and low cost phones. The iNANDUltra product features a a 20Mb/s W & 40Mb/s R function, and is the main memory that used for Android based phones. At the high end, the iNANDExtreme features a 50Mb/s W & 80Mb/s R for tablets, high end smart phones and portable gaming/gaming phones. The iNANDExtreme parts were made available to key customer samples in Q3 ‘11 and will be in production by Q1 ‘12 to support products integrating the memory that are released at CES ‘12.
SanDisk eMMC iNAND products
All of the embedded devices use MLC flash as the cache RAM in the designs, this is due to it’s high endurance and performance (high speed & low power). The eMMC applications allow for partitioning of the memory space into a root code block and other blocks. This helps simplfy the tasks of the memory, as phone function, messaging, photo, email, and media content can be directed to separate locations in the same physical memory chip.
The iNAND products feature up to 4th generation TLC (3 bits per cell) Flash supporting up to 64GB die. The eMMC has a strong basis for ECC technology, which allows the MLC flash to behave at BER close to those of SLC with similar performance. The new products also feature power awareness. There is both use optimization and dynamic multi-die interleaving. The use optimization includes the optimization of read/erase cycles, BER, power mode, and wear leveling based on the host request streams.
In addition to the eMMC products, we talked to Doreet Oren about there commercial SSD products. The product line has been in place for a while and has now extended from standard 2.5" form factor SATA interfaces SSDs to Mini SATA interface to the uSATA interface on the iSSD product built on a BGA footprint. The ability for the SATA interface to supplort botht virtualized partitions and virtualized machines, has made it the interface of choice for multi-tasking and virtual machine hardware. As these devices move to smaller form factors, the luxury of a removable connector or edge connector interface can not longer be supported. With this trend in mind, SanDisk took their BGA footprint SATA device to the SATA working group and gor the interface approved as the new microSATA (uSATA) interface format.
SanDisk SSD Form Factors
It iSDD product features a SATA 3.0 (6GB/s) interface with 2nd generation power and temperature control. As the form factor for tablets, new portable devices, and TVs are getting thin, the thickness (z axis) of the device is key. The iSSD products feature a 1.2mm thickness for the 32GB drives, 1.4mm for 64GB and 1.85mm for the 128GB SSD device. These devices were demonstrated at Computex recently showing a power usage of only 10mw for a 128GB drive.
SanDisk iSSD BGA SATA Drive
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