An industry is helped measurably when it has a front man who's easily recognizable. It's even better when that person is universally liked.

For the NAND flash industry in 2014 and for the past few years, that man would be Steve Wozniak. The Woz brings his story as Apple co-founder, chief scientist for solid-state storage maker Fusion-io (now part of SanDisk), middle school teacher, lifelong device designer and builder--and former "Dancing with the Stars" contestant--wherever he goes.

With one of his Fusion-io colleagues, vice president Lee Caswell, lobbing him questions, Wozniak addressed a near-full house of about 1,500 attendees Aug. 6 at the ninth annual Flash Memory Summit here at the Convention Center.

For the record: Fusion-io ioDrive, introduced in 2008, was the first direct-attached, solid-state server-side storage array that uses PCI Express connectivity. The ioDrive is small--barely larger than a typical handheld device--that uses advanced NAND flash chip clustering to perform the same functions as a spinning desk storage array, only with much faster read/write performance and with much less power draw.

Fusion-io's PCIe drive is capable of 180,000 random read/write IOPS--more than 100 times faster than a typical SATA (serial ATA) drive. PCIe was introduced by Intel in 2004. It is a computer expansion card standard based on point-to-point serial links rather than a shared parallel bus architecture, and is designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP standards.

Wozniak's topics on Aug. 6: The state of NAND flash today, how he became an innovator, why people are actually falling in love with personal devices and why he was a "Tom Swift" book fan, among others.

Wozniak, 63, joined Fusion-io in February 2009 as chief scientist because "NAND flash is the premier memory product of the day. People talk about a lot of competition to it: phase change memory, magneto resistance and all this, and that they'll all be cheaper and faster and denser. But you have to get that density factor down. They're not there yet.

"It's like the economies of scale. So many NAND chips are made for so many products now that they're just the cheapest memory going. It's so far along the curve, that for a low price you can make a chip with upteen gigabytes; you gotta equal that with other technologies before they'll take over," Wozniak said.

Flash represents a big shakeup in storage, and Fusion-io is innovating within the sector ("Plug the NAND flash straight into the server; that's a whole new category," he said). Yet flash is convincing Wozniak that "we might be near the end of Moore's law. We're getting down on flash to storing a 1 and 0 with eight electrons, so you're starting to get down to the point that you'll need to add more error correction bits then you'll save in the dimension shrinkages."

That technicalese for "we're simply running out of physical space on the media itself."

By: DocMemory
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