Advanced MCPs for the Changing Mobile Market

An interview with Eric Spanneut, director of mobile memory marketing.

Chris Smith: Eric, thanks for talking with me today. I’ve noticed that Micron has been focusing more and more energy on the mobile market. Today, the company introduced a new line of MCPs; could you tell me a bit about these products?

Eric Spanneut: We are announcing the adoption of our latest process technologies—both NAND and DRAM—to our line of high-end MCPs. It means that we have leveraged our 34nm single-level cell (SLC) technology on the NAND side, as well as our 50nm technology on the low-power DRAM side.

Chris: Is this the first 50nm designed into your MCP products?

Eric: This is our first monolithic 2Gb LPDRAM, which is being adopted by our MCP product line.

Chris: What range of the mobile market will these MCPs serve?

Eric: These products will serve the high-end feature phone market, and the smart phone market that uses open operating system like Windows Mobile, Android, or Symbian, as well as the nascent mobile internet device (MID) market.

Chris: I notice that this MCP uses LPDDR, but I know you manufacture LPDDR2; when will you transition this MCP to LPDDR2?

Eric: We see growing interest in LPDDR2, but first adoption by handset vendors won’t happen until second half of 2010. We expect LPDDR to be the front-runner in terms of volume for the next three to four years. That said, when the transition does begin, handset vendors will recognize significant advantages with LPDDR2, including reduced pin count, higher frequency and a better power budget.

Chris: So, if LPDDR2 has these benefits, why isn’t it being widely adopted at this time?

Eric: The mobile value chain is a very complex one with a complex ecosystem. It always takes a long time for a new technology to be massively adopted.

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Enterprise NAND—Some Industry Perspective

We’ve had tremendous feedback from customers, partners, media and analysts on our Enterprise NAND announcement.  So I thought I’d include a couple of perspectives from the industry on the potential impact of Enterprise NAND:

• “a significant milestone for the industry, one that’s likely to increase confidence in the technology.”
—Bob Merritt, analyst
InternetNews.com

• “proves wrong all those people who think that high-endurance devices will never be supported by advancing lithographies.”
—Jim Handy, analyst
Enterprise Storage Forum

• “Micron made a major announcement this week touting a new memory structure that simultaneously drives up the density and write performance of current Flash memory.”
IT Business Edge

Huge Reliability from Tiny NAND

Since introducing our 34nm NAND nearly a year ago, we’ve made big  strides in both performance and reliability. Now, nearly all of our NAND products are built on 34nm—leading the industry in density and efficiency.

In fact, our 34nm process is so solid, we’ve even moved our super-high cycling Enterprise NAND parts to it. We just announced 34nm SLC and MLC Enterprise NAND parts that can hit 300,000 and 30,000 cycles, respectively. These new parts deliver unmatched density, cost-efficiency, and reliability and will open up new potential for NAND storage in enterprise applications.  Watch my quick explanation below to understand why.

Is NAND Ready For Enterprise Applications?

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about NAND in enterprise applications. Can NAND hit enterprise requirements? Will sub-40nm NAND ever serve this market? Is it really a compelling choice? Put simply: yes. Here are a few reasons why:

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Tripling NAND Performance in Mobile Systems

We’ve been getting great response from customers who’ve seen our NAND performance demonstration, so we wanted to share it with a wider audience.

The test pits our single- and dual-plane SLC devices and NANDCode™ FTL software against Samsung’s OneNAND™ running on Microsoft’s FTL. The test system is a TI OMAP™ 3430 development platform running Windows Mobile® 6.5 OS. We changed out the onboard NAND with a simple PISMO card swap and then ran a 10MB system performance test.

The results are impressive and undeniable. The key is our custom NANDCode FTL software, which enables advanced performance features like dual-plane programming.

Watch the video below to see why some of our competitors’ customers have been willing to open their design cycles to take advantage of the big NAND performance gains offered by Micron’s MCPs.

Visit our Web site to learn more about our NANDCode software and how you can use it to boost performance in your next mobile design.

A look Inside the Flash Memory Summit ’09

Micron’s Kevin Kilbuck, director of strategic NAND marketing talks about the hottest buzz happening at this year’s FMS. It’s been a lively show this year, with an interesting debate about bringing high-quality NAND to enterprise applications, as well as a big announcement from us and Intel on 3-bit-per-cell MLC NAND technology. Let us know what you think about our interview with Kevin, and be sure to stay tuned for future news and updates.

SLC, MLC, & 3-bit MLC NAND—What’s the Difference?

In this 5-minute whiteboard video, strategic marketing director Kevin Kilbuck provides a brief description of the technical differences between SLC, MLC, and 3-bit MLC NAND. He also discusses how these products fit into a NAND process roadmap and why 3-bit MLC can be an effective complement an aggressive shrink roadmap (not a substitute for one). You’ll learn:

•    How the cell bit count controls the relationship between die size and density
•    Why cell density affects performance and reliability
•    Why 3-bit MLC is only suited for specific applications
•    How 3-bit MLC can complement an aggressive shrink roadmap
•    Why NAND process windows are going to grow in the coming years

Find out more about choosing the right NAND on micron.com/nand.

Micron’s New NAND: Great Space, Less Filling

No doubt about it—our appetite for mobile digital downloads continues to thrive. We’re downloading video, music, games and photos at a record pace. In fact, Nielsen says that online music stores saw more than 1 billion downloads last year. I’m a contributor to these downloads too–as I sit here and write this post, I’m jamming out to my iPod listening to the ever-so inspiring Mick Jagger. But I digress.

The point is, we need the storage capacity in our mobile devices to hold the huge amounts of data we consume. So what’s Micron doing to feed that capacity appetite? Today we announced new 16Gb and 32Gb NAND products built using our ground-breaking 34nm NAND process technology. These new NAND chips not only make it possible to store more on your smartphones, cell phones and MP3 players but also enable bigger and better memory cards, like Lexar’s new 16GB microSDHC card. Built with our super tiny 16Gb die, Lexar’s 16GB microSDHC card, can store up to 48,000 2-megapixel JPEG photos, 4,000 songs, or 80 hours of standard-def video—allowing you to super size your portable device’s capacity and enjoy more of the stuff you love.

And for the photography buffs out there, Micron’s new 32Gb NAND chip has made it possible for Lexar to create a new 32GB Lexar Platinum II SDHC memory card. That’s enough capacity for 12 hours of HD video or over 20,000 5-megapixel images! And since we’ve added a high-speed NAND interface to all of our new high-capacity NAND products, these new cards are seriously fast; speed-rated at 60x. This gives our photo enthusiasts the ability to take full advantage of their camera’s burst-mode setting to capture many images in rapid fire succession.

So whether it’s photos, video, music, or games you’re after, Micron’s new NAND products give your portable devices the additional capacity they need to store all your favorites—so you can watch and rock out to more media than ever before, all from the palm of your hand.

Beyond MLC NAND: Some Perspective

There has been quite a buzz in the industry lately about NAND flash products that are capable of storing more than two bits per cell, so I wanted to just take a minute and provide our perspective.

Simply put–what ultimately matters is having the lowest cost-per-bit solution in volume production at a given moment in time, not how many bits per cell are stored. Now, that said, there’s no question that being able to store more bits per cell results in lower cost.  However, there are some serious trade-offs that we think make this option not viable at this time.  Most notably–performance and reliability suffer.  In fact, we estimate that the performance (measured in write-cycle throughput) for going from two to three bits per cell using the same NAND architecture and process technology could be as much as halved. And reliability, (measured in write-cycle endurance) could be up to an order of magnitude worse (yes—up to 10x worse).  Scary stuff. Because having a product that may have a lower bit cost, but doesn’t meet today’s level of performance and reliability limits the value of that product.  It’s also worth noting the greater burden on the system implementation of going beyond today’s well-understood MLC technology, such as making sure the controller provides adequate ECC coverage.

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Choosing the Right NAND

A 2Gb NAND Flash memory device organized as 2048 blocks

We just published a new white paper that offers an overview of some of the various technologies of NAND across the burgeoning market–from basic MLC and SLC to High-Endurance and Serial NAND. Because each of these flavors offer significantly different performance capabilities, features, and benefits, my hope is that it can be worthwhile starting place in helping designers make informed decisions about their memory choices, and get the best out of their designs. Learn more