The Future is Flash

Though the world of technology seems to move very fast, it has more in common with a marathon than a sprint. Just like a long-distance race, industry success requires stamina and the ability to focus on a goal that may be far ahead.

Even as far back as the 1990s, when Samsung was a global leader in the DRAM market, the company was constantly looking forward, trying to develop the technologies that would define the next era of innovation.

Source: Samsung

That pioneering spirit remains to this day. But as we saw earlier in this series, the genesis of Samsung’s current status as the world’s market leader in flash memory lay in the decision back in 2001 to develop its technology independently.

The determination to pursue ever-greater memory capacity and micro-processing capabilities in-house has resulted in one breakthrough after another. It paved the way for Samsung to become the first in the world to mass-produce 1Gb NAND flash in 2002, and the first to develop a 40-nanometer 32Gb NAND flash in 2006.

Since becoming the world’s No. 1 flash memory maker in 2003, Samsung has repeatedly changed the paradigm for storage devices, producing some of the world’s most advanced NAND flash technology. In 2006, the company kicked off a new age of PC storage when it commercialized solid state drives (SSDs). The launch of the SSD created a powerful alternative to hard disk drives (HDDs) that is quieter, faster, more reliable and more energy efficient.

Having anticipated the paradigm shift to SSDs, Samsung set about tackling two significant obstacles that were preventing the technology from achieving mainstream consumer acceptance: high price tags and large sizes.

Source: Samsung

In 2006, the company overcame those problems and released the world’s first 32GB SSD-equipped PCs, opening a new market for hard-disk-free “digital” computers. Samsung has held the largest share of the global SSD market ever since, in large part by taking the development of all the key SSD components (NAND flash, DRAM, controllers and firmware) in-house.

In August 2013, Samsung announced another breakthrough, becoming the first company to overcome the limitations of semiconductor refinement and mass-produce its proprietary 3D Vertical NAND (3D V-NAND).

Source: Samsung

The company’s innovative design for stacking cells vertically rather than on a single layer was a landmark advancement from both a structural and processing standpoint. This innovative cell arrangement, along with the introduction of 10nm processing technology, enabled gaps between memory cells to become much narrower without risking interference from the leakage of electrons.

Samsung had initiated the era of mass-produced 3D memory, and it proved another monumental moment for the industry.

The development of mass-produced 3D V-NAND accelerated the popularization of SSDs, offering consumers high-performance, high-capacity and low-cost.

The innovations kept coming. In 2015, Samsung introduced a technology that conquered conventional speed limitations; the PCIe-based NVMe interface, which offered six times the bandwidth of the benchmark SATA data transfer technology. In the same year, Samsung solidified its position as leader of the consumer SSD market by launching an all-new kind of external storage device called the Portable SSD T1.

Source: Samsung

The journey does not stop there, and Samsung continues to strive to develop ever-more innovative technologies. Certainly, the decisions taken at the Zakuro restaurant meeting 19 years ago look more prescient every year. As global IT companies accelerate their investment in sectors like big data and the cloud, demand for SSDs and data centers is still rising, which in turn boosts demand for high-performance, high-capacity NAND flash solutions.

Meanwhile, applications for SSDs in devices such as game consoles have increased in recent years, and with falling NAND prices making SSD drives even more affordable, it’s little surprise that sales are steadily rising.

From sales of 280,000 consumer SSDs in 2011, Samsung’s cumulative SSD sales reached 10 million units in 2014, 85 million in 2019, and are forecast to reach 100 million in 2020. Sales of portable SSDs are rising as well, reaching 3.8 million in 2019, compared with one million in 2017.

Anticipating that long-term growth in demand, Samsung has announced plans to establish a NAND flash memory production line at its Pyeongtaek campus, which will begin mass-producing cutting-edge V-NAND products in the second half of 2021.

Like a marathon runner, Samsung has consistently kept its eyes on the road far ahead, and seen that flash is the future.