Sizzling markets spark memory innovation
09/01/2005
The demand for memory used to be driven mainly by business applications. That sector continues to grow with the rise of the Internet, e-commerce, and e-tailing, and much more active product tracking in retail channels as well as for just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing.
But today’s surging demand for memory is coming from a new direction - consumer electronics. The consumer market is moving toward dominance in data storage just as it has in semiconductors. Music fans are storing large libraries of songs for instant listening on portable players. Digital cameras are flashing everywhere, storing scores of shots of family events and tourist sites. Cell phones with built-in cameras are proliferating so fast that more digital cameras are being sold embedded in pocket phones than as stand-alone products. Now designers are adding video to the mix, as phones migrate from 2.5 to 3G, and the voracious appetite for memory will accelerate as a result.
This consumer boom is reviving the hard-disk storage market, especially in the areas of micro-drives and micromedia. Growth is projected to be strongest in the tiniest versions at 1.8 in. and ≤1 in. This intensifies pressure on reduced areal density while keeping costs low enough to compete with solid-state memories. As the article on p. S8 discusses, some vendors are already moving to perpendicular rather than longitudinal recording to keep pace. To maintain throughput, process tools and their handling mechanisms also are being updated to deal with the tiny media.
Components within the disk drive must also advance to increase storage densities. Read heads are moving toward technologies like tunneling magnetoresistance as feature sizes become even smaller than those for ICs, and femto-based sliders will be needed with tailored aerodynamics to control flying height over the disk, as described in the article on p. S16.
Meanwhile, advances continue in semiconductor memories. It would be very desirable to put high-density flash memory right onto the same chip with microprocessors and logic, but the processing challenges are formidable. The article on p. S10 describes how some innovative process steps are enabling Tower Semiconductor to integrate its microFlash technology onto CMOS system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs with high reliability.
The quest for more and more memory is far from over. The industry is moving toward a convergence of computers, communications, and entertainment, and huge capacity memories will be needed to handle storage of a wide assortment of data from multiple types of media. It will all be linked together with home networks, which are just entering the marketplace. Stored movies, TV programs, games, and an assortment of other types of data, from the Internet or other media, will reside in what may become an “infotainment” center. Video and animated graphics will be a large part of the libraries to be stored for instant access.
Businesses are also developing techniques for data mining, to extract intelligence from huge quantities of stored information and present it with dynamic graphics. This will require massive amounts of smart storage.
All of these trends will keep data storage developers hopping to meet exponentially growing demand for years to come. The technologies they develop are often revolutionary, like spintronics, which may move beyond storage to switching and logic applications. We’ll keep you posted.
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Robert Haavind
Editorial Director