Next-gen storage wars: In the battle of RRAM vs 3D NAND flash, all of us are winners

Within a few years, you'll likely be carrying a smartphone, tablet or laptop with hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of hyper fast, non-volatile memory, thanks to two memory developments unveiled this week.

First, Samsung announced it is now mass producing three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) chips (seen at top); then start-up Crossbar said it has created a prototype of its resistive random access memory (RRAM) chip.

Three-dimensional NAND takes today's flash, which is built on a horizontal plane, and turns it sideways. Then, like microscopic memory skyscrapers, it stacks them side-by-side to create a vastly more dense chip with twice the write performance and 10 times the reliability of today's 2D, or planar, NAND.

Crossbar

A 3D representation of Crossbar's RRAM technology

The most-dense process for creating silicon flash memory cells to store data on planar NAND is between 10 nanometer (nm) and 19nm in size. To give some idea of how small that is, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter -- a human hair is 3,000 times thicker than NAND flash made with 25nm process technology. There are 25 million nanometers in an inch.

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Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2046282/next-gen-storage-wars-in-the-battle-of-rram-vs-3d-nand-flash-all-of-us-are-winners.html#tk.rss_all

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