14 DAY TRIAL // End-users even remotely versed in hardware will have heard at least once about the power efficiency and data-transfer speed benefits one may take advantage of when buying a solid state drive. SSDs are so far ahead of HDDs in these two areas that storage-solution developers are more concerned with increasing their capacity than anything else. Nevertheless, a certain Japanese research team went ahead and focused on finding ways to make NAND flash memory even less power-hungry, while dramatically boosting performance.
The team, composed of researchers from Japan's Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, is led by Ken Takeuchi, associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, Graduate School of Engineering of the University of Tokyo. This group actually came up with a technology that supposedly enables the creation of NAND Flash chips that consume far less electricity than today's solutions while writing data at a revolutionary speed.
The speed cited is of no less than 9.5GB/s. Not gigabits, gigabytes. Such a data rate makes even the 1.5GB so far achieved by PCI Express SSDs look like a child's accomplishment. This performance is possible because, by reducing consumption to 1V (compared with 1.8V), parallel writing can be done to 100 NAND chips at once.
The team dubbed the procedure the single-cell self-boost technique, which, as TechON! reports, “turns off two cells adjacent to the unchosen cells by applying a voltage of 1V from both ends of the bit line connected to the unchosen cells so that the channel of the unchosen cells is in the state of floating.” This supposedly reduces an SSD's overall power consumption by 86%.
Of course, since the technology has only just been developed, there is no way that a 10GB/s SSD will actually be launched anytime soon. However, this technology does confirm that Flash storage has a very high potential.