You need three things from a solid-state disk (SSD): speed, capacity, and reliability.

You need three things from a portable SSD: speed, capacity, reliability, and diminutive size. And you can’t get much smaller than packing an SSD into the form factor of a USB memory stick. That’s exactly what LaCie has done with its FastKey drive. It’s packed a 30 to 120Gbyte USB 3.0 SSD into the form factor of a slightly oversized USB memory stick but the LaCie FastKey doesn’t perform like a memory stick. Depending on capacity, the read/write speeds of the LaCie FastKey are 210/70 to 260/180 Mbytes/sec. Add in 64Mbytes of DRAM cache and 256-bit AES encryption and you’ve got one Hulk of a memory stick.

Now I don’t know this for a fact, but it seems to me that you can’t build a product like this with conventional IC packaging. The volumetric allowances argue for more of a 3D chip assembly approach. And whether or not this particular product employs 3D assembly, the existence of the LaCie FastKey points the way to a future where the innards of many such memory-stick SSDs will make use of 3D assembly. After all, plastic IC packaging really adds no value to this sort of product and merely gets in the way.

Increasingly, 3D assembly is going to become a competitive advantage when the end product’s size matters. It already matters in mobile phone handset design and 3D assembly is widely used in this niched (but very large) market segment. As time unwinds, 3D assembly techniques will improve and get less costly because of high-volume mobile handset market demands. The rest of the industry will follow.

On June 12, 1989, I flew to Minnesota from Denver, Colorado, picked up a rental car, and drove from Minneapolis to Bloomington to attend a special disk drive conference being held by the leading vendor of cutting-edge 5.25-inch hard disk drives—Imprimis—which was the disk-drive spinout subsidiary of Control Data Corporation (CDC). I had an ulterior motive on this trip: to get two of Imprimis’ 330Mbyte SCSI disk drives for my EDN “All Star PC Project.” The Imprimis drives were the biggest, baddest hard drives available at the time and Imprimis had a world-class lead in high-speed drive design attributable to CDC’s world-class magnetics research center in Bloomington. Unfortunately, June 12, 1989 was also the day that CDC announced Seagate’s purchase of Imprimis and the addition of Imprimis' magnetics research facility to Seagate’s growing technology arsenal. So I arrived at Imprimis to find the conference cancelled and no one to speak with. I left the Imprimis lobby to fly back to Colorado within an hour of my arrival at Imprimis, without the drives. (I did eventually get a pair of those drives for the All Star PC project, but that’s a story for another time.)

Fast forward to 2010—this week in fact. I’m at the 8th International SoC Conference in Newport Beach, California and I’ve just heard a presentation from Seagate’s VP of the Memory Products Group R&D team Pat Ryan. His topic: spin-transfer-torque magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM). This R&D group is part of the Minnesota magnetics research group that Seagate bought 21 years ago and that facility is just celebrating its 50th year of existence.

Despite having written several detailed articles about MRAM and STT-MRAM, I had no idea that Seagate had a team working on the technology, but it makes sense. The fundamental memory cell in an MRAM, STT or otherwise, is the magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) and it turns out that MTJs are very familiar to disk drive vendors. “We make millions per day,” said Ryan, “to serve as read/write heads in disk drives.” The company has devoted some resources to investigating the use of MTJs in STT-MRAM.

It turns out that Seagate knows a lot about STT-MRAM and MTJs.

Researchers at the company know how to make thin anisotropic magnetic films that allow magnetic polarization that’s perpendicular to the junction, which improves storage stability. They also know how geometric scaling affects read and write currents for STT MTJs. They have put lots of read/write cycles on STT MTJ memory cells and know that the MTJ’s storage abilities do not degrade with extended cycling. They also know that the memory retention is well hardened against external fields and radiation.

Finally, they know that STT MRAM will be giving embedded SRAM, DRAM, and NOR Flash a run for the money starting around the year 2013.

But don’t look for Seagate to be a player in the STT MRAM IC competition. Ryan gave the clear impression that Seagate is currently only interested in enhancing hard-disk drive performance. It will leave the IC race to others.

Claiming that the move unifies Apple’s product line, Steve Jobs yesterday announced two new lightweight MacBook Air notebook computers. Significantly, neither HDD nor optical disk storage is an internal option for these two new laptops. SSD is the only storage on offer, with capacities from 64 to 256 Gbytes. Although Jobs claims that Apple placed the SSD “right on the motherboard,” the images he showed were of a small circuit board (clearly NOT a standard SSD board format) that plugged into the motherboard. Elements of the announcement that make the new MacBook Airs more resemble an iPad include multi-touch gestures on a generous touchpad below the full-size keyboard, a Mac-specific app store, an app home screen, full screen apps, auto save, and apps that resume when launched.

Here’s more coverage at MSNBC.com’s Techblog: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/10/20/5322959-live-coverage-apple-reveals-macbook-air-mac-os-x-lion-ilife-11-and-more

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. The fastest way to get high performance from an SSD is to bypass the disk interface and plug the SSD directly into the PC’s PCIe port. Vendors of high-performance (read “expensive”) SSDs do just that. So just where does startup (or is that “upsart”) Angelbird Ltd. get the moxie to announce a PCIe-based SSD card that sells for $239? The card is called “Wings” and is said to boot on PCs and Macs. For $239, you get a base card with 16 Gbytes of NAND Flash storage. A second version of the card with 32 Gbytes of SSD is also offered. Both cards implement a 4-lane version of PCIe. However, the really innovative feature of the Wings PCIe SSD card is that it acts as a carrier for as many as four add-on SSDs. The add-on cards look like SATA drives minus the aluminum case and they plug into four sockets on the PCIe carrier card. With four drives snapped into place, the Wings card delivers peak read/write speeds of 1081/945 Mbytes/sec.

Hitachi-LG Data Storage has updated the hybrid optical/SSD drive it announced earlier this year (How does a hybrid SSD/optical drive make sense?) by integrating the SSD with the optical drive controller and making both the optical and solid-state drives accessible through one 6Gbps SATA III port. The first-generation drive introduced earlier this year at the Computex electronics show in Taipei was essentially an SSD tacked onto and stuffed into the same case as an optical disc drive. The result was two separate drives, each with its own SATA port. The new drive fully integrates the optical drive and SSD onto one circuit board that share a common 6Gbps SATA III connector.

IEEE Spectrum has just reported on the successful fabrication of graphene-based memory cells on a flexible plastic substrate by Sung-Yool Choi and his research team working at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea. The memristor memory closely resembles that of HP, using a simple crosspoint-array interconnect, with a memory cell made of graphene oxide instead of HP’s titanium oxide at each crosspoint. In both cases, the memristor effect results from the force of an electric field that pushes oxygen atoms back and forth within the memory cell. The experimental graphene cells measure 50 microns, so they’re more than 1000 times larger than those developed by HP, but the graphene cells are made with a much simpler, non-IC process technology and the cells are deposited on flexible plastic, which opens the technology up to many, many interesting—and potentially low-cost—uses.

You’ll find the IEEE Spectrum article here.

More Memristor articles in the Denali Memory Report:

The 6-minute video guide to memristors (must-see video)

HP’s memristor finds a commercial semiconductor vendor: Hynix

Rice University reports that silicon oxide also good for memristors

Rice U’s silicon-oxide memristor more phenomenon than device, for now

EETimes’ Brian Fuller is blogging live from the Renesas DevCon down in southern California and he reports this morning that Renesas has announced plans to incorporate MRAM (magnetic RAM) in its microcontrollers built using 90nm process technology, with parts to be introduced by 2013. At that geometry, Renesas expects the MRAM to support 150MHz operation. Two years later using 40nm process technology, Renesas expect to hit 200MHz.

Conceptually, MRAM is well suited to use in microcontrollers because it’s fast like DRAM and nonvolatile like Flash but doesn’t have the write-cycle limitations of Flash. If Renesas pulls off this feat of manufacturing, its microcontrollers will be able to employ “unified memory.” Only one type of memory with one address space and only one type of memory access protocol is needed to satisfy all of the on-chip storage needs of the microcontroller. Although there are a few small MRAMs on the market, the technology has not yet moved into the commercial mainstream. If it does, it will welcome back magnetic storage—which was king of the hill from the 1950s through the mainframe and minicomputer eras and then banished to obscurity in the early 1970s when DRAMs first appeared.

MRAM is one of several “new” memory technologies vying to displace DRAMs and Flash memory. Others include PCM (phase-change memory) and memristor-based memory, which Hynix just licensed from HP for potential future commercial production. Hynix is calling memristor-based memory ReRAM, for “resistive RAM.”

SandForce has just announced a new enterprise-class SF-2000 SSD processor family including the SF-2500 and SF-2600, which deliver approximately twice the performance of the company’s existing SF-1500 SSD processor. The new SSD processors start with SATA III 6Gbps host interfaces that have twice the maximum bandwidth of the SF-1500’s SATA II interface. Maximum sequential read/write performance is now rated at 500/500 Mbytes/sec, up from 260/260 Mbytes/sec, and maximum read/write IOPS performance is also doubled from 30K/30K to 60K/60K. The new SSD processors support more and faster Flash memory interfaces as well: async, Toggle-Mode, and ONFi2 at transfer rates as fast as 166 Mtransfers/sec. ECC protection is boosted to accommodate 30nm- and 20nm-class Flash devices, up from 24 bits per 512 bytes to 55 bits per 512 bytes. Encryption capability has also been boosted to 256-bit AES, plus support for the existing 128-bit AES encryption.