Successful data management can mean the difference between a reliable, user-friendly product, and a frustrating nightmare of corrupted data and a failed device. Your approach to this key component of good device design will either fast-track your product for success or prove toxic to its implementation and derail market adoption.
The experts on fast, reliable data management are coming together for a one-time exploration of the signs of a “toxic” data management strategy, and to offer advice on how you can make sure this doesn’t happen to your project.
Please join us on November 13th at 7:30am and 12:00pm Pacific Standard Time, for an interactive, moderated discussion between Datalight and McObject. Topics will include combating slow device boot and poor access performance, and how to save money on unnecessary processor upgrades.

Register for the 7:30 Session

Register for the 12:00 Session

Hope you can make it!

A week of SSD, NAND questions and New Technology

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since the invention of flash memory, but the 20-foot timeline documenting its milestones that was displayed at this year’s Flash Memory Summit offered ample evidence of the progress the technology has made. Attendance at this third Summit once again broke records set by previous shows and the energy of the attendees was high. At more than 1,300 registered attendees, 2008 was at least 25% larger than 2007. Having been a sponsor since the show’s inception, we can confirm that it was even more packed this year. Most of the keynote presentations spilled out of the main hall, and people were stacked up into the hallway trying to hear what was being said inside. The quality of the presentations once again proved worth the trip to Santa Clara, but it was obvious to everyone that the show is quickly outgrowing the Santa Clara Marriott.

The unofficial theme this year appeared to be solid-state drives (SSD), but beyond the SSD buzz, there were many presentations on designing NAND-based products, software optimization of flash, future technologies, and other flash-related topics of interest. Datalight gave four presentations (Flash Interfaces 101), and organized a forum on using flash in embedded as well as a full-day “executive update.”

There were a couple of keynote addresses we found particularly interesting and entertaining:

Dean Klein from Micron gave a speech entitled, “A Closer Look at NAND Flash.” Highlights of Dean’s keynote included a map of NANDs progress through the Gartner Cycle of Hype,

Gartner Cycle of Hype – Source: Gartner Research

in which he asserted that NAND is over the “peak of inflated expectations,” heading down into the “trough of disillusionment.” Klein jokingly referred to hard-drives several times as “rotating rust,” and the address featured an entertaining series of video clips along the lines of Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads, in which Hard Drive was escorted by Flash to a therapy session to talk about his sluggishness, forgetfulness, narcolepsy, and overeating (power consumption).

Eli Harari from SanDisk gave a keynote called “Changing the World: The Flash Memory Revolution.” Eli’s speech was less humorous than Dean’s, but no less interesting to listen to. He showed several timelines describing the evolution of flash applications, and a chart predicting that NAND demand will outstrip supply by 2011, allowing flash vendors to raise prices (!) and finally get a return on their investment in the technology. He also compared the progress of NAND density to Moore’s law, showing that NAND is tracking far ahead of where Moore’s law says it should be. He theorized that the next flash technology will be 3D NAND, and gave a fascinating demonstration of how it’s built and how it works, including photographs of 3D NAND’s unique architecture.

Spansion showed their ecoRAM: basically flash in a DIMM form factor. Cool. And eco-friendly, apparently. This new class of flash promises to reduce the power requirements for large server applications, using an eighth of the energy of DRAM, with better reliability, and read performance fast enough to meet the rapid access requirements of large-scale server installations.

Which highlights another key theme of the Summit: Power. How can flash help reduce global warming? Can SSDs make data centers run more economically? Uh, did I say “data centers?” Yes, surprise! While last year’s Summit saw the invasion of the laptop, this year a significant portion of the sessions addressed opportunities in the Enterprise segment.

But the “Big E” didn’t totally eclipse the “Little e” (embedded). There is still a growing need for low power, high performance flash soldered onto boards and into removable cards for embedded systems. The embedded track had presentations ranging from the basics of flash interfaces and differences between NOR and NAND to complex design methodology and frequency sources for flash memory applications.

Speaking of last year’s Summit, where Hybrid Hard Drives (traditional hard disk drive with flash caching) battled SSDs for attention, whatever happened to the HHDs? The only sign of them we saw was a presentation from Seagate wherein they said there is still work to do, particularly on the software (i.e., Windows Vista).

Our take overall? Industry insiders’ perspectives are essential for long term planning and this show is the place to get them. But all that crystal-ball-gazing can be a bit out of phase with where customers are today. SSDs are interesting and undoubtedly will be a key component in many future designs, but the reality is that migration from NOR-only systems to those that include both NAND and NOR or just NAND continues to be the mainstay for today’s designs. An analyst from IDC cashed a reality check on the SSD hype when he put up a slide showing relative market sizes of flash memory (big), hard disk drives (huge) and SSDs (tiny).

While many flash manufacturers are in an oversupply situation on NAND, others have parts on allocation. The industry as a whole is looking for ways to reduce costs and keep (or get) fabs profitable. This causes lower volume, lower margin product lines to be discontinued, sometimes just as designs using them are about to go to market.

Bottom line? The Flash Memory Summit provides a great opportunity to step outside our day-to-day reality and consider the possibilities promised by emerging technology. Next year’s Summit is sure to be a must-attend event for gaining planning perspective. We hope to see you there!

If you missed the Summit, presentations should be available soon at www.FlashMemorySummit.com. Bill’s presentation on flash interfaces, complete with narration, is available now: Flash Interfaces 101

Bothell, Wash., – August 12, 2008 – Datalight announced today that it has released new versions of Reliance™ and FlashFX® Pro, with pre-configured support for  MontaVista® Linux®. The new install experience includes simplified integration within MontaVista DevRocket, an Eclipse-based IDE that streamlines common embedded  development tasks. Dropped into DevRocket, Datalight products build as kernel loadable modules that work with a project’s OS image. Sample bootstrap code is also  supplied for developers who need to integrate the products into a boot loader.

“Developers choose MontaVista Linux for faster time-to-market, integration, and stable, fully tested code. We are pleased that Datalight has extended these benefits at  the flash memory file system level, and to provide embedded Linux developers with added performance and reliability,” said Dan Cauchy, Senior Director of Market Development, MontaVista Software.

Other upgrades include a read-only version of Reliance inside the Datalight Loader. This small footprint version permits a bootloader to load an OS image directly from a reliance partition. Devices benefit from risk-free “in-place OS upgrades” enabled by the application-controlled transaction point feature of Reliance. The new versions also feature enhancements in reliability, as well as support for a wide range of new flash parts. FlashFX Pro now supports Spansion NS-P, Samsung FlexOneNAND, Micron 55nm flash parts, and all CFI-compliant NOR parts. The Datalight flash file system solution is comprised of the Reliance file system and FlashFX Pro intelligent flash media manager. Reliance was designed from the ground up for high reliability applications. Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology provides 100% immunity from file corruption, even after unexpected system interruption. Embedded applications can benefit from faster boot times that remain consistent for the life of the product, regardless of disk size.

FlashFX Pro features pre-written support for over 200 flash parts, works with virtually any NAND controller, and features wear leveling, bad block management, and garbage compaction for unrivaled performance. Datalight flash file system products are also available on other operating systems and integrated development environments.

Bothell, Wash., – August 12, 2008 – Datalight announced today that it has released new versions of Reliance™ and FlashFX® Pro with preconfigured support for Wind River Linux. The new install experience includes simplified integration with Wind River Workbench, an award-winning, Eclipse-based development platform. Dropped into Wind River Workbench, Datalight products build as kernel loadable modules that work with a project’s OS image. Sample bootstrap code is also supplied for users needing to integrate the products into a boot loader.

“Developers choose Wind River Linux for our broad range of hardware support and stable code base. Our VxWorks customers have enjoyed the benefits of the Datalight  flash file system platform for years, and we are pleased that Wind River Linux customers now have the option of adding Datalight performance and reliability to their designs,” said Paul Anderson, vice president of Linux product engineering at Wind River.

Other upgrades include a read-only version of Reliance inside the Datalight Loader. This small footprint version permits a boot loader to load an OS image directly from a  reliance partition. Devices benefit from risk-free “in-place OS upgrades” enabled by the application-controlled transaction point feature of Reliance.

The new versions also feature enhancements in reliability as well as support for a wide range of new flash parts. FlashFX Pro now supports Spansion NS-P, Samsung  FlexOneNAND, Micron 55nm flash parts and all CFI-compliant NOR parts.

The Datalight flash file system solution is comprised of the Reliance file system and FlashFX Pro intelligent flash media manager. Reliance was designed from the ground up for high reliability applications. Dynamic Transaction Point technology provides 100 percent immunity from file corruption, even after unexpected system interruption.  embedded applications can benefit from faster boot times that remain consistent for the life of the product regardless of disk size. FlashFX™ Pro features prewritten  support for more than 200 flash parts, works with virtually any NAND controller and features wear leveling, bad block management and garbage compaction for unrivaled performance. Datalight flash file system products are also available on other operating systems including Wind River VxWorks.

Image via Wikipedia

WindowsForDevices has an interesting article today that shows the results from a recent ABI research study on high-end handset sales. It is interesting to note that the economy has not slowed down sale of higher-end mobile phones and the overall mobile market has been strong as well. This bodes well for flash memory vendors, especially for NOR flash vendors like Spansion and Numonyx since mobile handset industry has been a NOR stronghold (though lately NAND is making heavy inroads - call it the iPhone effect).

Datalight Sponsoring and Presenting August 12-14 in Santa Clara

Every August, flash memory zealots converge on Santa Clara to trade war stories, find out what’s new, and debate the relative merits of a mind-boggling assortment of flash technologies. Now in its third year, the Flash Memory Summit is set to break attendance and sponsorship records yet again, and Datalight will be there waving the banner of fault-tolerance, flexible design and raw performance. Other sponsors include intel, Spansion, Samsung, Micron, Toshiba, Numonyx, Dell and many others.

We hope you can join us at the world’s only conference dedicated entirely to flash memory technology. This year we’re excited to present four tutorial sessions at the show, given by veteran Datalight engineers Keith Garvin and Bill Roman:

View Session Overviews

Image by daslive.blogspot.com via Flickr

Gartner just announced their latest research on mobile phone sales. Here are some of the highlights

1. Q1 2008 worldwide sales – 294.3 Million
2. Growth in emerging markets [Asia/Pacific, Latin America] and slowdown in mature ones [US, Europe, Japan]
3. Nokia maintains market leadership with 39.1% market share
4. Motorola woes continue – share drops from 18.4% to 10.2%
5. LG and Samsung capitalize on Motorola’s challenges.

The entire press release is located here and is very informative. If you are in the mobile software/hardware business, I’d strongly recommend you check it out.

Interesting piece of news today - Digitimes is reporting that Samsung has informed its customers that it will be reducing supply of NAND Flash chips because of the huge order placed by Apple. This story is being picked up by several news outlet including Engadget. While this is good news for Apple and all those vying for the 3G iPhone, it underscores the challenges other OEMs that depended on Samsung Flash will be facing. NAND flash market is very volatile with demand - supply economics changing rapidly. Intricacies of flash memory force most OEMs to rely on a single vendor for supply, that way they do not have to implement support for several flash parts in their design. While this may seem the easier route, situations such as today’s causes production to come to halt or a significant redesign, both which are very expensive alternatives.

One of the ways to reduce such risk is to include support for multiple flash parts and use multi-sourcing to source flash parts from 3-4 flash vendors. If you are using an intelligent flash manager like FlashFX Pro , you are already covered since FlashFX pro supports 200+ flash parts from all top flash vendors. For others, it can still be done with some serious effort during planning and design time. Consider this work as an insurance against an event such as today’s.

Adoption by Industrial & Mil-Aero Promises Some Rewards & Major Issues

MLC NAND is experiencing a high rate of adoption and within the consumer electronics sector – MP3 players, digital cameras, smart phones, flash cards and USB drives – it is everywhere you look. However, other embedded segments (industrial, automotive, military, aerospace, etc), are hesitating to take advantage of MLC’s low-cost, high-density attributes. There are good reasons behind the cautious stance; these applications are often mission critical, have a low tolerance for failure, and are expected to perform consistently over a much longer lifespan than their counterparts in the nearly-disposable consumer world. These requirements are in direct conflict with some of MLC’s known shortcomings: shorter lifespan, shorter data retention times, higher error rates, more complex (and consequently slower) error detection and correction.

On the topic of lifespan, traditional single-level NOR parts are typically expected to endure up to 100,000 cycles, which could translate to 20 years of use in a typical embedded application.  Most MLC NAND is rated for 10,000 cycles, rendering these parts unusable in 2 years under the same use case.  While 2 years is a long time for many consumer grade products, it is unacceptably short for the vast majority of industrial products. Similarly, data retention requirements differ.  Traditional flash data retention rates have been 20 years, but recently some flash parts are being introduced with only a 10 or 15 year rating. Applications involving products with life times in the 10 year range need to consider such limitations.

Lower erase cycle endurance is conceptually easy to manage: track high use areas and occasionally swap the data within those areas with a low use area. However, a major difficulty is brewing that involves how errors are introduced and the performance impact of detecting and correcting them.

When writing pages within an erase block, disturb errors may be introduced, causing some number of bits to be flipped in pages other than the one being written to. The time required to read and verify the contents of the entire erase block can cause unacceptable delays, leading programmers to defer the detection until the next read operation, which may occur infrequently. Consequently, bit errors can exist in these “not written to” pages for a long time before they are detected.

And the issues with MLC error rates will worsen, as each new generation of chips pushes the cell size down even further. Future generations of MLC NAND devices beyond the 35nm range may have to distinguish between only a few hundred electrons on each cell. With so few electrons, discerning among the multiple levels of charge in a cell will be a time-consuming, error-prone process.

The somewhat obvious solution is to put in place a process to read and verify areas in the vicinity of writes in an attempt to detect disturb errors earlier.  A solution like this must be carefully balanced with the system performance requirements.

MLC NAND has many compelling reasons for adoption, but until its challenges are successfully dealt with, it will not be broadly accepted by industrial, mil-aero, and automotive device designers as a viable replacement for tried and true technologies of SLC NAND and NOR.

At Datalight, we are focused on easing many of the problems of MLC NAND. For more information on our intelligent flash management solutions, please visit our resources page.

Hi All:

Welcome to the Datalight blog on “Data Matters”.   It’s amazing to see the increase in size and value of data in devices over 25 years that Datalight has been in business.   In the old days, well the 80’s, Datalight worked with Flight Data recorders that held data on 3.5 inch floppies using the FAT file system and  similar non-reliable foundations.  Today, device data requirements are growing at a tremendous pace. These requirements include reliability, performance, size and flexibility in media, bootability and system field-update requirements.

Image by mr brown via Flickr

On the consumer front, the spectrum moves from the inexpensive GO Phone, up to the Feature phones (with multimedia capabilities) toward the Smartphones that can assume the role of a MP3 Player, a movie Player or an office management system for the road warrior.

The more demanding embedded devices hold data that is much more valuable, sensitive, and mission critical.  These devices succeed or fail based on how they handle, store and deliver the data to the final data consumer.

There many “Good Enough” solutions that, well, aren’t really “Good Enough”!     Datalight is committed to Risk Free Device Data, and that’s what this Blog is all about.   If you require more than “Good Enough” for your device data, then keep reading.

Thanks for joining us!

Roy Sherrill
President