The cries for increased memory capacities at lower price points have reached an almost deafening crescendo. Over the next few years, market research firm IDC predicts worldwide installed raw storage capacity will climb from 2596exabytes (Ebyte) in 2012 to 7235EB (7.235zettabytes) in 2017. To put this number in perspective, lEbyte is 1018 bytes, or more helpfully, equivalent to the storage available on 31million 32Gbyte iPads. Until recently, lithographic down-scaling was the most common way to increase memory density - the number of bits that could be stored per unit of silicon. However, recent advances in semiconductor production technologies have enabled engineers to fabricate chips containing three dimensional stacked cell structures. These structures not only answer the clamour for increased bit density, but they also overcome many of the challenges caused by lithographic die shrinks. With 3D NAND structures now in production, solid-state drives (SSDs) with more than 15Tbyte of storage are just around the corner.
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