Researchers at Keio University in Japan have devised a way to link memory chips together without wires, possibly opening the door for smaller or more memory-dense solid state drives.
Using inductive coupling, individual NAND flash memory chips create a wireless data link when stacked on top of one another, effectively eliminating the need for 1,300 wires that traditionally pass around internal data. The 200 wires remaining in the drive are used for supply, grounding and control, Nikkei reported from the International Solid State Circuits Conference.
Traditionally, several chips are connected by wire and combined into "LSI packages," of which there can be several in one solid state drive. Keio University and its partners managed to condense 64 memory chips into one LSI package by stacking them together.
The benefits to this development are size and power consumption. The number of LSI packages in the is reduced to one eighth of what's typically required for SSD. Power use dropped by 50 percent in the wireless model, presumably because communication between each chip is no longer driven by wire.
If this experiment can find a viable path to market, it'll mean smaller solid state drives or more storage space packed into existing sizes. And of course, you can't go wrong with less power consumption, either.
