Toshiba and SanDisk don't have a monopoly on the technology anymore

May 21, 2014 06:28 GMT  ·  By

It looks like SanDisk and Toshiba haven’t remained the only providers of 15nm NAND Flash chips for that long. In fact, it didn't take even a month for Micron to reveal that it, too, is making storage devices based on the 15nm architecture.

Solid-state drives aren't like HDDs, which have several ways of improving. Their performance relies mainly on two things: how good the controller is and how advanced the storage chips themselves are.

LSI, Indilinx, Marvell and others have the controller part well in hand, especially LSI with its SandForce series (which was originally an independent company).

The NAND chips have recently advanced a bit too, though the view, so to speak, is a bit muddled, since this isn't like on the CPU or GPU market.

Central processing units and graphics processing units usually stick to one respective architecture. Case in point, CPUs are made on the 32nm node right now, while GPUs are designed for 28nm.

SSDs are a bit more troublesome though, because each NAND chip provider moves at its own pace, and has certain optimizations of its own.

So the current landscape is riddled with 25nm, 20nm, even 19nm units, though there are some 45nm or older chips as well.

The smallest node still brings the most advantages, however, in terms of data density and power efficiency.

Right now, 15nm happens to be the best technology, and Micron has been working on it since back in 2013. Before that really. July 2013 was just when its 128 Gb 16 nm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory debuted for the first time.

Multi-level cell NAND chips have multiple levels per cell to allow more bits to be stored in the same number of transistors, kind of like having two (or more) cells in the same space as one. The benefits are the same as if you had two chips, stacked on top of one another. It enables a larger capacity at the cost of endurance, in the long term. They're also cheaper than SLC.

The 16nm NAND chips from Micron will finally make their entrance on the growing SSD market at Computex 2014 (June 3-7, 2014), as part of a Crucial drive.

The SSD will be a normal 2.5-inch unit, not a PCI Express drive or an M.2 storage unit like the ones we've seen cropping up lately. Possibly because Crucial wants the benefit of familiarity to apply.

The specifications aren't known, and even the name has been withheld, but pricing is supposed to be “very competitive.” Presumably, the newcomer will settle somewhere between the Crucial M500 and the M550. Needless to say, the SATA III interface will be utilized (SATA 6.0 Gbps).