Storage Lithography: A Key to the Future

Storage Product Evolution and Process Requirements

SSD Product and Technology Roadmap

Solid state drives (SSDs) solve significant needs for numerous applications ranging from high-end enterprise storage to notebooks. The deployment of SSDs will take many forms, as the potential implementations are very broad. This session will provide in-depth analysis of the key drivers of SSD technology in the range of potential applications, and it will set forth the industry technology roadmap.

Within that roadmap, there will be the need for improved cost yet with high reliability. This session will cover the critical process requirements to achieve the right mix of cost and reliability.

Overview of the applications driving the demand:

Within the Enterprise – Scaling I/O Performance to Meet the Evolving Needs of Data Storage Systems. The catalyst for SSD adoption is the fact that enterprise storage systems are starving for faster storage I/O performance, and HDDs do not enable fast I/O. In order to keep pace with surging processor performance capabilities, virtualization and the explosion of new applications that demand fast random access to data, the enterprise storage realm is poised to adopt SSD. The industry has coined the term ‘Tier 0’ to reflect the role SSD will hold in the enterprise, indicative of the fact that enterprise-class SSD provides DRAM-like performance while combined the attributes of significantly less cost, more capacity and more energy efficiency than DRAM. The incorporation of enterprise-class SSD provides immense system-level benefits as a result.

Within the PC – Performance, power-savings and improved reliability are the key drivers of SSD adoption in PCs. Recent breakthroughs in MLC capacities and innovative solutions at the drive-level to the issues of performance and reliability are making SSD in the PC a reality.

This session will cover the key technological distinctions of the various tiers of SSD. We will provide detailed overviews of the evolving SSD characteristics that will be required to meet the needs of the various applications utilizing SSDs. As SSDs proliferate, so will the options in terms of performance, price, interface and functionality. We will create a map of the technological tiers and demonstrate how major technological breakthroughs will enable new applications.

While the underlying motivator for SSD adoption will be performance, the magnitude of adoption across a broad spectrum of applications will be governed by price. In order to improve price, the media needs to shrink. We will introduce in this session “Moore’s Law of Storage” – in order to take cost down, media technology needs to move rapidly to smaller process geometries. Analogous to the way HDD-based media pushes the evolution of aereal density, SSD technology mandates the continued march down the geometry curve.

During this presentation, we will explore the various types of NAND technology, both SLC and MLC, then diving into multi-bit per cell configurations, all of which will correspond to reductions in media costs. We will evaluate chip size trends, cell efficiency trends and the die shrink schedule which will ultimately render very low cost NAND media for use in SSDs.