Category Archives: Blog

3D NAND is on the way, but it’s not going to be here tomorrow.

Last week, Toshiba and SanDisk announced that they were jointly investing in a production facility in Japan, coming on line in 2016. This will be good news for smartphone and other mobile device users: the storage capacity of 3D NAND will be 16 times greater than what’s in there now.

While the transition to 3D NAND gets underway, SanDisk and Toshiba will be revving up the interim technology.

SanDisk’s 1Z-nm technology will be applied to both 2-bit-per-cell and 3-bit-per-cell NAND flash memory architectures with production ramp to begin in the second half of 2014. The 15nm technology scales chips along both axes, and will be used across a broad range of SanDisk offerings, from removable cards to enterprise SSDs.

Toshiba’s new process replaces its 19nm process technology, and is aimed at providing a transitional step to 3D NAND, said Scott Nelson, senior VP of Toshiba America Electronic Components’ memory business unit. Toshiba’s 15nm process works in conjunction with improved peripheral circuitry technology to create chips that achieve the same write speed as chips formed with second generation 19nm process technology, but boost the data transfer rate to 533 megabits a second — 1.3 times faster — by employing a high-speed interface. (Source: EETimes)

​Just as NAND is used in SSD’s (in place of a platter based hard drive), in the embedded world they are used on-board to hold a file system. The increased speed is great, as it improves the performance of apps that require reading large volumes of data from the file system. But NAND is inherently prone to bit-errors. The controllers correct for it, but over time and wear, the bit-errors grow.  As the geometries get smaller, the density of bit-errors gets higher, but – as the article goes on to point out – the controllers are getting better faster than the error rate is growing.

Embedded applications really benefit from enhanced longevity. Certainly, the apps Critical Link works with aren’t throwaways that get tossed when the next new thing comes along. Allowing for more write cycles before wearing a sector out, wear leveling drivers have helped a lot with longevity improvements. The consumer market can deal with more errors and shorter longevity. As often as not, cell phones are traded in when the next upgrade becomes available. Let’s face it, the cell phone providers have us addicted to our next upgrade, and the next re-up of our cellular contract that results.

So here’s a prediction for you: when the 3D NAND starts hitting the market, the lure of storage capacity that’s increased by more than an order of magnitude will have consumers clamoring for upgrades. Think of all those movies you’ll be able to store on your smartphone!

In a recent Atlantic Monthly, there was a brief, but interesting, article on batteries, in which journalist James Fallows asked Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu and Yi Cui, who is a battery researcher, about the importance of building a better battery.

You don’t need me to tell you about the importance of batteries. They’re essential to all those electronic devices – laptops, smartphones, tablets – that have become so critical for 21^st century life. They’re also an important (and, at present, to some extent a limiting) factor with respect to more widespread adoption of electric cars. And then there are the “utility-scale batteries” needed for renewable energy sources:

Utility companies will need batteries to stabilize the flow of renewable energy into the grid, plus a better electrical control system to do the switching. People may have these batteries at their houses instead of generators…

…There is a slow march toward improving today’s systems, by 5 or 10 percent a year. Meanwhile, many innovative companies, scientists, and engineers are exploring novel approaches. Many of them may not work. But there is a reasonable chance that a couple may work—and really work, to double or triple energy density and lower cost. If you are a battery company and your cost per unit of storage doesn’t drop by a factor of two in the next five years, you are going to be out of business. (Source:  Atlantic Monthly)

One of those “novel approaches” was announced last year by researchers at the University of Illinois, who:

… have developed a new lithium-ion battery technology that is 2,000 times more powerful than comparable batteries. According to the researchers, this is not simply an evolutionary step in battery tech, “It’s a new enabling technology… it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It’s allowing us to do different, new things.” (Source: Sebastian Anthony of Extreme Tech.)

As electronics engineers, those of us at Critical Link like to stay on top of what’s happening in the battery world, out of both general interest, and because of the implications that battery development holds for the applications that our clients develop.

Critical Link has a long history with defense applications, and battery life is a huge issue for future defense programs. One example: we’ve done work on mesh networking for defense applications, which can enable networks of unattended sensors in the field. Unattended networks have a lot of advantages to the warfighter…persistent eyes, ears, and even noses in the field without putting soldiers at constant risk. But what good is that if you have to physically get to each sensor to change the battery every few days?

We’ll be following the “better battery” story closely. From our viewpoint, it’s a lot more important than someone building a better mousetrap (at least to those of us who a) don’t have mice; b) still know how to bait the old spring trap).

Even though I live in upstate New York, where there are plenty of dairy farms, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about where the milk on my cereal and the cream in my coffee comes from, other than that it comes from cows. But I do spend a lot of time thinking about technology, and how it’s being used in so many different ways. So I was intrigued by a recent article in The New York Times on robotic milkers.

Now milking machines have been around for over one hundred years, and even the more automated and robotic milkers have been used for a while, but, as technology gets more and more sophisticated, so do those robots.

“Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking five or six times a day — turning the predawn and late-afternoon sessions around which dairy farmers long built their lives into a thing of the past.

“With transponders around their necks, the cows get individualized service. Lasers scan and map their underbellies, and a computer charts each animal’s “milking speed,” a critical factor in a 24-hour-a-day operation.

“The robots also monitor the amount and quality of milk produced, the frequency of visits to the machine, how much each cow has eaten, and even the number of steps each cow has taken per day, which can indicate when she is in heat.” (Source: NY Times.)

Okay, so maybe that last bit was too much information, but this is a very interesting application of vision systems and other technology.

Anyway, I was interested enough to spend a bit of time grazing (sorry!) around the sites of a couple of the companies that make the robotic milking equipment.

One of the ones I looked at, Lely, has a robotic milker called the Astronaut – can’t imagine where that name came from – and part of their value proposition is that “the cow is key”, and that the Astronaut is “the natural way of milking.” Well, I don’t know exactly how “natural” a robotics milker is ever going to be, but it probably is the future way of milking. By the way, I figured out that they do ARM based processing – what processors they use I couldn’t tell you.

What I can tell you is that those robotic milking machines have come a long way from the 4H kid sitting on stool, milking by hand.

While you’re probably not likely to be running Windows XP on your own PCs (maybe other than the one in the kitchen you use to pay the bills on), there are an awful lot of XP’d up computers out there. I saw a recent article in The Wall Street Journal Online that put the number at 300 million,

… including many that manage water, electric and sewage treatment plants and ATMs.

This is important because Microsoft has end-of-lifed XP. No more updates, no more security patches. Which is bad news for those 300 million computers, which will now be ultra-vulnerable to new security threats.

The software giant itself will further contribute to the problem in May, when Microsoft issues updates to Windows 7 and Windows 8, more modern operating systems built on a similar blueprint as XP. The patches Microsoft sends for those operating systems will be pointing hackers to possible weak spots in XP without supplying the fix.

Just as there will be enterprising hackers out there, I’m sure that some enterprising good guys will jump in to help solve potential security problems and/or to help migrate those who have critical applications (like water, electric, sewage treatment, and ATMs) that have embedded PCs to embedded systems with more of a shelf life. Even if this happens – which it no doubt will – the end of XP still represents a big concern.

XP, for a number of reasons (including the security holes and frequent patches) was a pretty poor embedded solution to being with. In general, PC-based boards have low longevity. This means that customers get whip-sawed by frequent changes, and the need to requalify a product when the PC-based boards get swapped out, which can cause Windows driver compatibility issues, among other potential problems.

Anyway, from our point of view, XP going away may well force more folks off of embedded PCs, and onto ARM or DSP-based SoMs.

This works for me…