SSD and 3D Flash Technology – S3DT (2 Days)

Chuck-Sobey126x152B$1,595– Solid-State Drives (SSDs) and flash caches continue to change the data storage industry. Embedded flash in mobile devices has changed the way we live. Persistent memory computing presents new opportunities to continue to drive innovation using the latest non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies. Treating these storage devices as “black boxes” limits the performance and reliability that can be obtained from them. It also limits the breadth and speed of innovation they can support in new applications. This class clearly explains the inner workings of these very important technologies.

Flash has undergone more than 30 years of development, but the speed of its recent development has brought it to the forefront of modern storage infrastructures. The unprecedented density of storage supported by 3D NAND combined with multi-bit per cell technology continue to make flash the storage technology of choice for new product categories.

This two-day seminar from KnowledgeTek provides engineers, managers, executives, and technicians a clear understanding of the concepts, possibilities, and drawbacks of flash-based storage in general, and SSDs in particular. It is presented for those with a technical background, but a deep knowledge of semiconductors or data storage devices are not prerequisites. You will learn how SSDs work; how 3D NAND flash works; how flash is changing the storage industry; skepticism for claims of reliability, low-cost, and low-power; limitations for flash’s future; and the pros and cons of emerging technologies poised to replace it.

OVERVIEW OF SOLID-STATE STORAGE
– Memory and storage terminology
– Persistent Memory
– Trends increasing flash adoption
– Emerging storage/memory     applications
– “The device determines the system”

FLASH APPLICATIONS & SPECIFICATIONS
– Why flash? Why now?
– Storage tiers are evolving- Top-level specification comparison (HDDs, SSDs, AFAs)
– Scale up vs. scale out
– Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCl)

FLASH TECHNOLOGY FUNDAMENTALS
– NAND flash specifications
– Memory cell structure
High-level structure and terminology
– – Planes, Blocks, Pages
– – Erase, Program, Read
– – SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC
– – NOR vs. NAND
– – 3D NAND

EVOLUTION OF SSD ARCHITECTURES
– Flash controller
– Improving speed
– Power management
– Security
– Assembly

DATA ACCESS & PERFORMANCE MEASURES
– Anatomy of an I/O
– IOPS, Bandwidth (MB/s), Latency, & Response time
– Queue depth
– SMART
– Benchmarks

INTEGRATING FLASH DEVICES
– NAND pricing snapshot
– Mobile, PC, Hybrids
– Form factors
– Memory channel

 STORAGE INTERFACES
Drive interfaces
– SATA, SAS, PCIe, DisplayPort, USB
– NVMe and fabrics
– NAND interface
– ONFI (Open NAND Flash Interface)
– Gen-Z
– Stack (“3D”) interfaces
– Hybrid Memory Cube, Wide I/O, High Bandwidth Memory

INSIDE 3D FLASH TECHNOLOGY
– 2D cell structures
– 2D array structures
– Floating gate and charge trap flash (CTF)
– 3D cell structures
– 3D array structures
– Process challenges

ENDURANCE & RETENTION
– Writing, reading, and errors
– Wear mechanism
– eMLC
– Tail bits
– The mixed effects of heat
– Wear leveling and garbage collection
– Write Amplification Factor (WAF)
– Performance throttling

ECC (ERROR CORRECTION CODING)
– How parity works
– Bit overhead
– BCH, Reed-Solomon, LDPC
– Soft Information
– Die-level redundancyE

MERGING MEMORY TECHNOLOGIES
– Crosspoint architecture
– Ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM)
– Phase Change Memory (PCM)
– Spin Transfer Torque (STT-RAM)
– 3D XPoint™ and QuantX™
– Emerging ReRAM (conductive bridge, Memristor)

FUTURE TRENDS
– Counterfeiting and data recovery, security
– Embedded NVM
– Spintronics including Spin Orbit Torque (STT-RAM)
– Drives of the next changes
– Key lessonsReferences