Solid State Drive Primer # 5 - NAND Architecture - Planes and Die

This is Blog #5 of 13 in our Solid State Drives 101 educational series. If you're ready, continue to Blog #6: Component Packaging.


 

Previous articles on the NAND architecture ranged from the basic NAND cell up to the block level. In this article we move up to discuss the plane and die level.As discussed in earlier Solid State Drive Primers, individual NAND cells are combined on Strings and Pages which are configured as columns and rows of an array. The overall array is called a Block. Some of the latest NAND components have block sizes as high as 8Mbytes.

This SSD Primer will build from the Block level to show the pieces that make up a NAND die.

The NAND Block Structure:

The NAND Block which is made up of a matrix of Strings and Pages is a building block for larger data structures. A single block is grouped together in a bank of many other blocks as shown in the illustration above.

The NAND Plane & Die:

This bank of Blocks highlighted in yellow above is referred to as a Plane. One or many planes are grouped together to form a NAND die highlighted in the illustration below. There are many configurations of die to meet many different design needs of OEMs.

A single die or multiple die stacked on top of each other are packaged into a usable form in popular JEDEC standard TSOP, BGA and other packages. The next article will cover this in detail.Over time as the requirements for additional storage continue, new ways of increasing density arise. One of the new technologies making its way to the forefront over the next few years will be 3D Memory.

If you would like to discuss this further please contact us.

Continue to Blog #6: Component Packaging or learn all about Solid State Drives:

Steve Larrivee has over 30 year's experience in the data storage market, including 5 years at Seagate Technology and 10 years at SanDisk. He joined Cactus Technologies Limited as an equity partner and Co-Founded Cactus USA in 2007 with partner Tom Aguillon. Learn more about Steve on LinkedIn.