MOSAID Technologies announced that it has engineered a production-ready 256Gb HLNAND (HyperLink NAND) Flash memory semiconductor chip. The high-speed, high-density 256Gb MLC (Multi Level Cell) HLNAND MCP (Multi-Chip Package) is optimized for mass storage applications, including enterprise data centers and high-performance computing applications.

"Our 256Gb HLNAND Flash device is one of the fastest, highest-density, best performing Flash memory devices on the market," said Jin-Ki Kim, Vice President, Research and Development, MOSAID. "By sampling production-ready 256Gb HLNAND devices, we are demonstrating that HLNAND can be manufactured cost-effectively, flexibly and at high yields. We are seeing significant interest in HLNAND because it is a high-performance, point-to-point interface that is scalable to large memory configurations without bandwidth degradation."

Flash Memory Powering the Cloud

Cloud computing services are among the fastest growing areas of enterprise IT investment. A report by Gartner expects large enterprises to have dynamic cloudsourcing teams in place by 2012. Cloud computing requires enterprise storage infrastructure that is flexible enough to accommodate elastic datacenter provisioning, while still providing the high performance expected by enterprise users. With the rise in cloud computing, there is growing demand for higher performance Flash memory devices, such as MOSAID's HLNAND, and Solid State Drives (SSDs) that enable significant improvements in enterprise IT environments.

The HLNAND 256Gb Flash memory device is packaged as an MCP composed of a stack of nine dies – eight industry-standard NAND Flash chips, and one MOSAID proprietary ASIC interface chip. The design supports either monolithic 32Gb MLC Toggle Mode or 32Gb MLC legacy asynchronous NAND Flash chips, evenly distributed over four banks. The interface chip contains the external high-speed HyperLink interface and controls each flash bank automatically and independently. The design supports an Error Detection Code (EDC) feature to eliminate bit errors in 'Command Packets' to ensure reliability and error-free communication of commands and register data. The device provides user configurable virtual pages for read with the various page depth choices, 2048B, 4096B, 8192B and a full page including extra bits.

Manufacturing and Availability

MOSAID has selected TSMC to manufacture samples of its production-ready HLNAND interface chip. The highly flexible design of the HLNAND interface chip supports different process nodes and interfaces, and can support both Toggle Mode and legacy asynchronous NAND Flash memory chips.

HLNAND2 Sampling Soon

MOSAID plans to introduce sample silicon based on its HLNAND2 specification in late 2011. Utilizing a high-speed, point-to-point ring topology, HLNAND2 facilitates SSD development with data transfer rates into the multiple Gigabyte-per-second range. With a raw data rate of up to 800MB/s per channel, and 1600MB/s per channel with DuplexRW™, HLNAND2 requires only one memory channel to reach a data transfer rate on the host interface exceeding 1 GB/s. In comparison, NAND Flash interfaces based on a parallel bus structure are limited to transfer rates of up to 200MB/s, with only a few devices supported on each channel.