The capacity of flash chips has doubled 14 times in 19 years. That’s
faster than Moore’s Law — the observation by
Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, that the capacity of
semiconductors doubles roughly every two years.
“We’re looking at a brick wall five years down the road,” says Eli Harari, the chief executive of SanDisk,
In 1990, when SanDisk shipped its first generation
of flash memory — the sort that can remember information even after you
turn off the power — each chip stored four million bits of information.
Today, the biggest chip SanDisk makes holds 64 billion bits.
SanDisk and other flash memory makers have figured out how to cram even more information
into that tiny cell. Until a few years ago, each of those cells worked
the way most computer memory does — it represented either a zero or a
one. Now the chip can actually count how many electrons are in a cell,
and depending on the number it can write and read up to 16 states
(recording a number between zero and 15, or four bits to a computer).
Let’s stop for a second to take stock of the wonder of all this. The
last flash memory card I bought for my camera held two gigabytes (16
billion bits). It cost me $6. And somewhere inside it is something that
is counting electrons 40 at a time. An electron has a radius of 2.8179 × 10−15 meters. In layman’s terms it is pretty much the smallest thing you could ever count.
BITS: Counting Down to Moore's Law
