Flash memory has grown like a weed in the last decade or so.
So what I want to do in this video is look at some of
the milestones which drove this tremendous growth in the field of flash memory.
And also describe to you what is the current state of the art.
Where do things stand as of October of 2012 in
the world of flash memory. So, some of the early products that
you might recall which used flash memory were these
these cards which were used primarily in in digital cameras.
The digital cameras really started to take off around 2000 and 2002.
I remember owning my first
one around this time.
And the other thing which was using flash at that time were these,
these USB drives which people were using to store their files.
And conviniently carry with them. And what they, they were you know,
around the capacity of anywhere between 256 MB all the way up to 1 gigabyte.
And what they used to consist was if you open one of these early ones up, what
they used to consist of was this flash memory
chip and this controller for controlling this flash memory.
So there was only a couple of chips which were used to be inside these these drives.
So the first major product consumer product which drove
this usage of flash memory was this iPod Nano.
which which was the first.
You remember iPods were introduced way earlier but
they were based on this hard disk drive.
The first iPod that used flash drive was this iPod
nano. And it used to come with this four
gigabyte of flash storage. And one way to position
this four gigabyte is that it's enough memory to hold 1000.
songs if you if you look at the size of one of your MP3 songs it's it's you know,
between four to five MB. So 1000 of that is is is, is 4 gigabyte.
And then the second part which really drove, again the demand in
flash memory, was iPhone and then other
smart phones. The first iPhone, it came with the minimum
memory size of 8 gigabyte, and the other
product which really drove this was these these MacBook Air
which was launched around 2008 and more
recently Intel has been pushing these Ultrabooks.
Which also use flash memory as their primary storage.
And this Ultrabook or this Macbook Air it used to have
64 Gigabyte of the Solid State drive. So, that's, you know, you can
see that from that iPod 4 Gigabyte to
iPhone 8 Gigabyte to this Macbook Air and Ultrabook.
Using a 64 GB of these, solid state, drives.
And, then the world change again in in 2010,
and there was this another product which was, iPad.
And, this again, used the, NAND flash as it's,
primary, storage or that's.
the only option you have for storing data and apps, and musics, in your iPad.
And again, it used to come in these various capacities, but again, a
lot of gigabytes are for flash memory, are for storing your data.
And that, that led to clearly an explosion in the market for
flash memory.
So this flash memory can be divided into two, the NOR and the NAND.
So most of the growth came in this NAND flash,
which is what is used in all these tablets, and smartphones.
And clearly this plot shows again how this market
for, NAND flash memory has grown reaching, North of around, $20,
billion dollars, in, 2012. In one
of the earlier videos, in the tear down, for iPhone we saw
this this flash, memory chip, and, it could,
range anywhere from, 16 gigabyte, and, all the way up to 64
gigabyte of storage in your iPad, and
it's a single chip which contains this much storage.
But if you open apart that chip as
I described to you in the earlier video, it's
not one single die, but it's a multiple of
these dies stacked on top of each other.
In this case it's 16 of these, or
actually 32 of these dies are stacked on top of each other.
So, well the growth and the capacity that is available per chip
The, the amount of storage that is available in in
in the flash memory chip has far outpaced
the growth you see in the number of transistors in the microprocessor.
So remember Moore's law.
what Moore's law says is that you see a doubling of your
capacity in every 18 months or every 1.5
years, but if you look in the world of flash because
of this tremendous growth in demand. The number of,
number of, bits or the capacity available per chip has
doubled every year. So all the way starting from,
2001. To all the way in 2009 or
2010, currently you can buy up to 64
gigabyte of flash storage in one
single, chip. And this is also known as the Hwang's Law,
named after Mr. Hwang who was the president of,
Samsung, microelectronics division of, of Samsung.
He also used to be a research associate at Stanford.
back in 80s.
And he, he gave this prediction that the amount of storage available in a
flash memory chip will double every year. And that has hold true for larger parts
of the last decade. And more recently Samsung announced this
chip which has shipping in 2012 which has 120
gigabyte of storage available in one single chip.
So remember this chip is not one single die, it
has multiple of these Dies are stacked on top of
each other and each of these dyes has been becoming smaller and
larger and capacities are shown on how the comparative size of these die.
Currently the minimum feature size on these dies
is, is Is is between 19 to 20 nanometers
and the maximum capacity in each
of these dies is is between
eight gigabytes to 16 gigabytes, which
translates into 16 gigabytes
as 128 gigabits. And remember it's many of times
people report these numbers in either gigabyte and
sometimes people report. When they talk about dies they report
these capacities in gigabits. so byte always has this bigger B.
And bit has this smaller b. So that's that's if you
see those numbers, you can identify them, whether it's a capital B or a small b.
So Intel and Micron flash
technology so on IMFT, they announced their chip in later part of 2011.
And it's 128 gigabit of capacity, or 16 gigabyte of capacity.
in one of these, chips.
So that is you know a tremendous, capacity available on,
one single die and also you know you can
stack, 16 of these, together.
And you can get, you know, 128, a lot of storage in one single chip.
And you can see the feature size over here so you know this is 20 nanometers .
So flash memory has by far become, you know,
the foremost driver of lithography technology for this.
compares you know, the minimum feature size available in different
types of devices. Logic, DRAM, and NAND.
And you can clearly see that.
The minimum feature sizes available in 2012, you can buy a chip which has a 20
nanometer, feature size for its set. And, that's you know in, as compared
to logic, if you see Intel's 22 nanometer Ivy
Bridge, that has a minimum gate length of, 30 nanometer.
So by far NAND flash memory
has become the, the, the foremost driver of lithography,
and a lot of it comes from this tremendous demand in the post PC era.
A lot of it also comes from
the fact that it.
It's the flash memory and the NAND flash memory especially it's very regularly out.
So, it's easier to apply things like
double patterning or quadruple patterning to flash memory.
So Flash memory was, in fact, the first to adopt double patterning technology.
And in fact this year we are seeing a products which are using
quadruple patterning technology already in in flash memory.
So the volume of nand flash memory in use
are being produced has been growing up very rapidly.
And that might you know naturally lead you to believe that the company which
make nand flash memory must be laughing their way to the bank but apparently
it's not the case.
And so let's, let's start to look investigate why why
is the NAND flash not as profitable for the company which made them.
So the first thing we look at is the, is the NAND flash memory price.
So, NAND flash memory, it becomes cheaper 50% every year.
So if you
bought flash memory
in 2010, it used to cost roughly
$2.00 per gigabyte. 2011 it was $1 a
gigabyte and its approaching between $0.70 to
$0.50 a gigabyte currently. And it
took over the dram price back in 2003.
and, if you look now, DRAM is at least
is 5 to 10 times more expensive as compared to NAND.
So, the NAND flash memory if you look in 2011
cost around somewhere near around a dollar
per Gigabyte. And, it it, it still continues
to remain you know, 20 times more expensive as or
ten times, at least, more expensive than a hard disk drive.
Because hard disk drive also it keeps on falling at a very rapid rate.
So even though the capacity is going up the price
for a NAND flash memory is keeps on going down.
So not only is the price of flash memory decreasing by 50% every years
but it varies quite a lot in a given month, or even day to day.
So, all these numbers that I just showed you
are all taken from this website called dram exchange.
And it lists out the price current selling
price of of of memory card using flash, or
spot
selling price of flash.
And as you can see, even within a day, the price can
vary quite a bit and as as you can see the name
of this website is dramexchange.com and whenever you hear things about like
exchange it reminds us of you
know commodities, commodities are traded in exchange.
And believe it or not but flash
is essentially despite all of the technological
advancement happening in the field. It is a commodity.
You don't think about it when we buy when we buy flash memory or we buy an iPod, all
we care about is, you know, whether it's 32 gigabyte or whether it's 64 gigabyte.
We don't care about whether Samsung made it or Toshiba made it or Micron made it.
So it makes it very difficult for if you are in a commodity market to make
any any money.
And this table over here it lists out the
top players in the field of NAND flash memory.
And the biggest 600 pound gorilla in the field of
memory, both in the NAND and DRAM is is Samsung.
It consistently has been owning around 40% of the market share.
The number two player is Toshiba which owns
does all its manufacturing in Japan and owns 35% of the market share.
And as we'll discuss later, they were in fact the first to invent flash memory.
And, the rest of the players are Micron, Hynix, oh no it's called SK Hynix,
and Intel, and together they own the rest of the 25% of the market share.
And you know despite,
these, flash memory growing by, such a huge amount in the post PC era.
This is a quote from E time that it says, you know the
only profitable vendor supplier of flash memory in the year 2009 was Samsung.
And so you know, it's, it's a combination of these things.
It's a falling price, but more importantly it's falling price,
it's the fact that memory is a commodity business, and the
fact that there are so many competitor. And primarily, you know
competitors, of having competitors is is good for the end
customer. but it's never good for, for the companies
which are competing with each other. And that I find this
quote by Genghis Khan to be very appropriate over here and