“To lead the entire semiconductor industry with the most advanced process technology is a phenomenal feat for Intel and Micron, and we look forward to further pushing the scaling limits,” said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron’s memory group. “This production technology will enable significant benefits to our customers through higher density media solutions.”

“Through our continued investment in IMFT, we’re delivering leadership technology and manufacturing that enable the most cost-effective and reliable NAND memory,” said Tom Rampone, vice president and general manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group. “This will help speed the adoption of solid-state drive solutions for computing.”

So what does this mean for consumers? Basically, the shrink to 25nm reduces the dies size of the NAND flash chips, which enables higher densities, and hence the chip count within products can be reduced by up to 50% when compared to the previous process generation. It allows for smaller, yet higher density designs at lower costs. For example, a particular SSD may be able to be produced using only 16 chips versus 32. Solid State Drives will feature larger maximum capacities while prices of current options will be driven further down. We were told to expect performance to be on par with 34nm products, though there are the obvious intrinsic benefits of a die geometry shrink from a performance standpoint.

Of course, there will be a number of products based on this technology over time. The first one will be the industry’s first monolithic 8GB NAND device. At a die size of 167mm², it is twice the capacity of their highest density 34nm part in roughly the same footprint. It is small enough to fit through the hole in the middle of a compact disc, but is able to store more than 10 times the data capacity of a CD. In roughly the same real estate, SSD makers will now be able to provide double the capacity as the previous generation.

IMFT is on track to begin production of this device and expects to start shipping in the second quarter of this year. Consumers can expect products featuring 25nm flash memory towards the end of 2010.

Micron and Intel are also supporters of the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI). ONFI is a consortium of tech companies working to develop open standards for NAND memory and supporting devices. The formation of the group was initially announced at the Intel Developer Forum in 2006 and began the effort to standardize the low level interface to NAND flash chips that are on the market today. One of the main motivations for this is to make it easier to switch between chips from different manufacturers, which allows faster development of NAND-based products and lower prices through broader competition among manufacturers. Besides Intel and Micron, the ONFI consortium is led by several prominent manufactures of NAND such as Hynix, SanDisk, and Sony.

The 8GB NAND device shown above supports the ONFI 2.2 interface standard, delivering up to 200MB/s of throughput bandwidth. Both Intel and Micron have been pleased with it and feel it is very much in tune to what they have driven in the DRAM world, using standard synchronous interfaces to increase speed. This is critical when SSD manufacturers rely on high speed communication between chips.

In January 2006, Micron and Intel formed IM Flash Technologies, LLC. IMFT combines the technology, assets, and industry experience of the two companies to create NAND flash memory. Jointly investing over $2 billion dollars, they opened up a semiconductor fabrication plant in Lehi, Utah which currently operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This fab employs about two thousand people.

The central area of the fab is the clean room, where the environment is controlled and air is scrubbed to eliminate dust down to micrometer size and no more than 10 particles per cubic meter levels. Before entering the fabrication areas, we put on clean room suits also known as bunny suits. These garments covered all parts of the body with the exception of eyes and the nose. Once inside, the lack of people working inside the fab was surprising. It was explained that most of the people we saw were technicians conducting preventive maintenance and ensuring the equipment operated within specifications. What the images are unable to show is the bustling movement of machinery occurring overhead and along the walls of this fully automated fab, carrying materials to the various stations within the plant.

www.hothardware.com

“The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems’ existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives. SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements,” said John Coyne, president and chief executive of WD.

Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These markets accounted for approximately 33% of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008. SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with Serial ATA, Parallel ATA, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5”, 1.8”, CF and other form factors. SiliconSystems has developed extensive intellectual property to address the stringent embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor, SiSMART, SolidStor and SiSecure technologies.

Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD solid-state storage business unit, complementing WD’s existing branded products, client storage, consumer storage and enterprise storage business units. SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.

“WD’s strong balance sheet, sales reach, and operations and logistics capabilities will allow us to greatly accelerate our penetration of our existing markets, while combining our engineering expertise with WD will enable us to develop new solid-state drives to broaden our overall product portfolio and address the emerging applications for solid-state storage in WD’s existing customer base,” said Michael Hajeck, a founder and chief exec of SiliconSystems, now senior vice president and general manager of WD’s SSD business unit.

www.xbitlabs.com

If you’re a Linux user, though, you might now have better success than other operating systems’ users, thanks to new, block I/O data integrity infrastructure code from Oracle that’s become part of the mainline kernel.

The code is in the currently shipping Linux 2.6.27 kernel, which debuted in early October. And as a result, its developers say it could dramatically improve protections against corruption during saving.

“When an application is reading or writing against storage, one of the things that could happen is silent data corruption — ‘silent’ meaning that the application reports that data as being correctly written, but it’s not,” Monica Kumar, Oracle’s senior director for Linux, virtualization and open source product marketing

“Silent data corruption can happen more frequently than you think, and it could cause millions of dollar of damage if it’s in a mission-critical business,” she said.

Kumar also said the enhancement also means that Linux now has an advantage that no other operating system currently offers — a benefit that could serve the open source OS well as its distributions continue to compete with established proprietary systems.

“Because Linux is now the first operating system that has the T10 standard implemented, I think it does have a lead in that sense,” she said. “I’m not saying other operating systems will not follow, but for now, Linux is leading in this space.”

Building on a standard

The new block I/O data integrity infrastructure code is an implementation of an industry standard, the T10 Protection Information Model designed for end-to-end data integrity for enterprise storage systems.

The code also adds what are known as Data Integrity Extensions, a technology co-developed with storage vendor Emulex that enables integrity information to be transmitted from memory.

Kumar explained that the data integrity feature works as an additional checkpoint at the operating system level, verifying the data being written or read. As a result, the process is designed to make data corruption less likely.

“The validity of I/O operations is assured through the exchange of verification information during data transmission,” she said. “The key is creating integrity metadata, so as the data travels the data path, the integrity metadata is validated.”

According to Kumar, Oracle and Emulex were working on the data integrity feature since mid-2006. In July of this year, the code landed in the Linux kernel development tree, ultimately becoming included in the final 2.6.27 kernel release in October.

Currently, the technology works with the Linux-based Ext3 filesystem, though Kumar noted that work is ongoing to validate the data integrity technology against other filesystems as well.

At the same time, Oracle and Emulex are pushing an early-adopter program to get a small group of end users testing and deploying the technology, which could help demonstrate its real-world potential.

Wider benefits

Since the data integrity technology is now part of the mainline Linux kernel, it is available to all Linux kernel users — and it could end up benefiting others beyond just Oracle and Emulex. Among two of the likely beneficiaries are Linux distribution vendors Novell and Red Hat.

“It goes without saying that any technology that improves data integrity is valued by Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers,” Nick Carr, marketing director at Red Hat, told InternetNews.com.

Michael Applebaum, senior product marketing manager at Novell, is also enthusiastic about the new data integrity technology.

“We see strong customer demand,” Applebaum told InternetNews.com. “Our heavy database users … for example, data warehousing vendors like Teradata, will benefit from enhanced data integrity.”

“We think such advanced features further establish SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the operating system of choice for mission-critical data center workloads such as major database, middleware and line of business applications, backed by our strategic partners SAP and Microsoft,” he added.

For the present, Oracle is talking up its contribution as it and Emulex build an early adopter program to get the technology more widely deployed among storage vendors.

As a result, Kumar also suggested that storage vendors will soon be announcing gear that is specifically optimized for the technology, but provided few additional details.

www.internetnews.com