From May 25th to June 2nd, per IMW finance chair Dr. Sung-Yong Chung’s invitation, Professor WANG Xuguang from Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech & Nano-Bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SINANO) attended the 5th International Memory Workshop (IMW) and later had a technical discussion with several R&D experts from Intel, Sandisk, Spansion and Marvell. The IMW is one of the most prestigious conferences dedicated to semiconductor memory development. This year it has more than 300 attendees from around the world like IBM, Intel, Micron, Sandisk, Samsung, Toshiba and etc. It also attracts numerous research institutes including CAS IME and Tsinghua University.
Several of the highlights are illustrated. In this year’s conference, the 1st short course is focused on the RRAM introduction and current research study summary. It has shown great progress for the material, process and device development during the last several years. Storage class memory using RRAM is very promising and test chip as large as 32Gb has been demonstrated by Sandisk. The invited talks is mainly focusing on the scaling trend of the NAND flash memories and all major players show strong confidence that NAND can be scaled for another 3-5 years at least. Another highlight is that research results from China have more appearances such as the papers from CAS IME, Fudan University and Tsinghua University.
During and after the conference, Professor WANG Xuguang had opportunities talking with researchers at Intel, Sandisk etc and explained to them their work on the solid state storage system development from SINANO. They also discussed on the potential issues such as the methods to improve the sub 10nm flash endurances and LDPC ECC development. Professor WANG Xuguang also got a chance to know the current research efforts on the SSD for Intel, Sandisk/Toshiba, which have put significant amount of resources onto this area. The SSD booming is clearly inevitable. |
