On this episode of the Six Five Podcast, host Daniel Newman is joined by Micron Technology‘s Russ Meyer, Senior Vice President of NAND Technology Development, for a conversation on the groundbreaking advancements in NAND technology. Micron, a leading name in memory and storage solutions, has recently unveiled a series of innovative products, including the world’s fastest data center SSD and the revolutionary G9 NAND technology, marking a significant leap in the storage industry.
Their discussion covers:
- Micron’s back-to-back announcements of cutting-edge products and their impact on the technology ecosystem.
- Insights into the Micron G9 NAND’s unique features and its positioning as the industry’s first in many aspects.
- The rationale behind Micron’s shift in naming its NAND technology to reflect industry generation, moving away from the traditional layer count.
- Micron’s strategy on leading NAND transitions, ensuring that announced NAND technology is not just a promise but a present reality in the market.
- The significance of the 2650 SSD powered by G9 TLC NAND, highlighting its performance benefits and value proposition amidst industry competition.
Learn more about Micron G9 NAND at G9 NAND | Micron Technology Inc.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Six Five podcast. I’m Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group and host here on The Six Five sitting in today for this conversation. We’re going to be talking to our friends at Micron about the G9 NAND, the world’s fastest. Now we’re going to talk about memory. By the way, talk about a renaissance. I mean in the era of AI, has there been a bigger moment for memory? Let’s talk about that. But let’s not talk about that with me alone. Let’s bring Russ Meyer. Russ is the Senior Vice President of NAND Technology Development at Micron. Russ, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Russ Meyer: Hi, Dan. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks.
Daniel Newman: It is good to be here. So you hear my little introduction, all excited like. Sometimes it’s funny about the booms and busts of semiconductors. And of course those sometimes historically commoditized technologies like memory where people like to put it in a box, we’re going to take it out of the box today. We’re going to talk about some of that differentiation. But what a moment you’re having, right? I mean, are you feeling it right now? I mean, the demand is through the roof. A few really great earnings after a tough period of time. Everyone at Micron has got to be feeling pretty good, right?
Russ Meyer: Yeah, that’s a great call out, Dan. We’re coming off a very challenging year in 2023, and as you said, we’re looking forward to some, let’s say, strong secular growth driven by AI and the applications that that’s going to drive for the memory demand. So we’re excited about that and we’re excited about our string of recent product announcements.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, that’s been a big part of the story with Micron. It’s not just memory, it’s about innovation here. And as we’re seeing with high bandwidth memory and what’s going on with it, powering AI, not all memory and not any memory serves the need. And as we hear about the rate limiting innovation and the rate limiting manufacturing requirements, it’s like we can build all the GPUs in the world, but if you can’t get enough memory, we can’t build the systems. And so this is coming to a head right now. But I want to talk about G9 NAND and I want to talk a little about what you’re doing there. You’ve been on a roll, lots of announcements. You had the SSD, the 9550, and now the G9 NAND and 2650. Kind of run me through these. Just run me through the whole thing. And I mean, you’ve even got the, what’s, the industry’s first PCIe Gen6 SSD for ecosystem enablement that you guys showed off at FMS. Wow, that was a mouthful, but give me the rundown on all these announcements.
Russ Meyer: Yeah, yeah, Dan. Thanks for noticing. We are pretty excited. We are pretty excited about the string of announcements. We’ve been busy here at Micron building some great products and targeting these storage solutions. They’re going to accelerate AI. The announcements that you highlighted, they’re pretty strong announcements as far as industry leading products. But the third announcement, and the one that’s very close to my heart is that G9 NAND technology announcement. And that’s not only an announcement of the technology itself. It’s the announcement that we are shipping that technology in a drive, the 2650 client SSD drive.
Daniel Newman: So let’s double click on that a bit. You’ve sort of started to allude to it, but give us a bit of a deeper dive on the G9 NAND technology. What makes it unique? This is sort of a first, right, NAND in an SSD?
Russ Meyer: This is the first ninth generation NAND in SSD, and it’s really, this is the culmination of years of a multi-year development cycle. So the team’s been working on this for many years now from concept through development to now to productization. And there’s many milestones along the way as we go through that cycle. But this milestone is always a big one for us ’cause this is the culmination, this is the realization of shipping this new technology into an actual product so our customers and partners can start leveraging the advanced performance that it delivers.
One of the focus points on this Gen9 technology is focusing on the performance and the increased bandwidth. We delivered that with multiple, let’s say, parameters. One is the on fee interface speed. So this is going to be an industry leading 3.6 gigabytes per second interface speed, which is a 50% jump from any competitive NAND available and from our previous Gen8 or G8 solution as well. On top of that, the latencies enable a 99% better read and 88% better write bandwidth than what we see on competitive die that are available today. So these are strong, these are pretty strong numbers. So this is delivering really driving now into the client SSDs, but we’re going to be driving products through data center and automotive with these solutions as well.
The other thing I’ll highlight, Dan, is the density. So we’ve driven the density on this NAND. It’s 73% more dense than what we see in competitive NAND shipping and SSDs today. If you compare it to our previous G8, we drove it to a 44% higher density. So gets us to a staggering 21 gigabits per millimeter squared on that component die. So the other enabler that we brought in with this technology is we’re doing a six-plane architecture within the word line. So what that enables is that enables a much stronger bandwidth and improve read and write performance, which from the customer usage experience is a stronger or higher quality of service. So you have less collisions between read and write commands.
So all this pulled together and the density was also key in enabling us to maintain the footprint in the 11.5 millimeter package, which we’ve been targeting, which is 28% lower than what we see with most of the competitors in the industry as far as how much area it takes on that PCB board. So it gives the customers a lot more, let’s say, flexibility and signal routing, thermal performance and the PCB layout in general.
Daniel Newman: No, I mean that’s really encouraging and I’m glad you called out the generation item. I was twisted tongue there. When you start going through the specs and builds of memory, it’s moving so quickly and there’s so much innovation going on. And speaking of moving quickly and innovation going on, you have been historically focused on layer counts, 232-layer NAND. Now you’re sort of pivoting here in this particular with the ninth generation and you’re not using layer count. I like my cakes with layers, but maybe I prefer my NAND with generations. Talk a little bit about why you did that, because obviously that’s still an important technological differentiation.
Russ Meyer: Yeah, there’s a couple points here, Dan. One is primary reason for the change, it drives consistency with how the rest of the industry is communicating their generational transitions with NAND. So it gets us more consistent with the industry. It also helps drive better clarity with the customers as to what products we have and what the generation they belong to. Historically, the layer count or the tier counts, historically, it’s been a kind of good headline metric. It’s been one of the key metrics that we highlight as to signaling where we’re at with the technology cadence.
But it’s really, the reality is that layer count is just one of several vectors that we have available to us to drive the scaling and the performance roadmap. So it’s just one of those vectors. And sometimes Dan, it’s not even the best one. So what we’re seeing as we look forward, I mean the customers are most concerned about performance, bit density, cost efficiency, power efficiency and those considerations, and like I mentioned, this layer count in and of itself isn’t the best way to bring that package together.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s kind of like in cars. Everyone likes to talk about horsepower, but sometimes that’s the best example. Sometimes it’s torque. Sometimes it’s the amount of efficiency you can get out of an engine. Different people care about different things. I think what you’re basically alluding to right now is that there are a number of key elements, that’s one of them, but this newest generation gives them many of these different key elements that they’re trying to optimize and build their products around.
Russ Meyer: That’s exactly right. And as a development team, one of the things we focus on is what’s the best overall solution to deliver the customer’s demands? And on the G9 for example, we put a lot of innovations and focus into compressing the array in an X-Y direction. So you get more pillars, more memory cells per unit area. And what that does is it allows us to get to those scaling numbers without driving tier count ever higher. And the other thing I point out is, and you’ll be seeing this across the industry, is layer count for the first decade of vertical NAND was a primary driver in the scaling. And what you’re going to see is there’s a paradigm shift happening as we go into the second generation of vertical NAND scaling, where there’s going to be a lot more pressure and focus on the other enablers for scaling above and beyond tier count or layer count.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. And look, there’s growing competition of course here in the US, leader, manufacturer, innovator, critical part of our infrastructure. And that’s been really important, even just following what’s gone on with the CHIPS Act and now with AI and the desire to build more here. But you’re not only leading here in the States, you’re leading around the globe from a design standpoint. I’ve watched Micron be a first in a number of different areas, especially throughout this NAND transition, shipping them in SSDs straight out of the gate. And I think this goes back four or five years now. It seems that when y’all make an announcement, that’s my Texas coming out, when y’all make an announcement around NAND, it’s real. It’s not a horizon. It’s not this is what’s going to happen in two years, or this is the next decade. It’s now. And of course, seeing it consumed so heavily in SSDs. Talk a little bit more about that kind of leadership that the company’s been able to achieve.
Russ Meyer: Yeah, connecting these announcements with product delivery to our customers is important. It really allows them to have confidence and a reliable understanding of what our timeframes are. So when we make these announcements, we like to link it to actual shipping of the next generation SSDs to our partners and customers. It’s not an announcement of an upcoming product in the next year, or it’s not an announcement of introducing next gen NAND into manufacturing. It’s an announcement of delivering these drives to our partners and customers.
So it’s a very real milestone and it’s one that we prioritize. Like you said, we’ve focused over the last few years to drive our next generations into the SSDs first. So G7, and back in 2020, we were the lead SSDs delivering G7. A couple years later we were the lead company delivering G8 into the SSD solutions. And we’re continuing that now with this recent announcement where we’re driving the ninth generation or G9 into the world’s fastest TLC data or client SSD.
Daniel Newman: And by the way, it would’ve been easy given the turbulent economy, the market, the difficulty of memory for Micron to probably, it wouldn’t have been fun, but you could have kicked and pushed things out. You could have said, “Hey, we’re going to slow R&D spend and we’re going to slow certain investments.” Actually, throughout those years you made a number of big commitments to building further capacity to driving innovation, and that wasn’t necessarily true across the industry. I mean, do you see this opportunity to keep the leadership? I mean, we’re seeing big dollars doled out in CHIPS act, some to you, some to your competition. What do you see there? Is staying in front something you feel comfortable and confident in?
Russ Meyer: Yeah. Yes. We’ve been driving the technical leadership for the past few generations, and we do expect to maintain that cadence. And you do make a good point is when you have very challenging industry periods like where we are just finishing up, it can be a real, let’s say, issue or challenge for the team to keep the cadence going. And the fact that Micron is able to keep this cadence moving despite the challenging headwinds is really a testimony to how important it is for us to maintain that technical leadership so that our partners realize that they have a strong technical leader with us.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s always such a push and pull with the markets, the economies, the pressures of Wall Street. You want to deliver. You want to make shareholders happy. And in this business, of course, it’s not like SaaS where it’s just kind of steady up into the right. It tends to be, there’s peaks and valleys. But any of us that’s been through these boom and bust cycles know that with every bust comes a boom and we’re back in it. But like I said, you’re kind of on the front edge. I want to make sure I’m getting this right about the way you’re approaching shipping the latest, so the 2650, for instance. First, it’s a client SSD. It’s one that OEMs will put into their system. It uses the G9, TLC 9 you’ve built, and it’s a value drive. So it’s leading, but it’s also being designed to be value, but therefore it’s still really highly performant. I’m curious. How are you tackling all those things? Usually it’s like that pyramid, you get two, but you give up something and it sounds like no sacrifice.
Russ Meyer: Yes. All the component enablers and the technology enablers that I walked through earlier, they’re all critical in enabling this total solution that we’re seeing on the 25 or 2650. And the component enablers are critical. They allow the realization on the drive itself to help improve real world user experience. And the 2650 does that. It does it very well. So if you look at it compared to current existing competitors, you’re looking at a 70% better sequential read, 100% better sequential write, 150% random read.
So all these show up as not only top level benchmark improvements, but they actually show up as improving the real world experience of our users and our customers. And there are some, let’s say, industry benchmark scores that target quantifying that and the G9 NAND on the 2650 in the PCMark 10, that score came at 38% better than what’s available in the market today. So the highlight there, Dan, is that these values or these performance numbers that we’re driving through the next-gen NAND are really coming out in the SSD for improved user experience. And we do expect that as we drive this G9 into data centers and automotive and other solutions, you’re going to see that benefit just carry forward.
Daniel Newman: Well, Russ, I want to thank you so much for spending some time. There’s a lot here to unpack. I hope everybody heard it, learned it, and if you didn’t get it all, of course you can listen again, but you can also check out the notes below. We put more information about the G9 and all the announcements we’ve mentioned here on the podcast in the show notes. Russ, you’re going to have to keep us up to date. Sounds like a lot of innovation going on. It’s really nice. Well, in 2019, I previewed the year 2020. Russ, I didn’t know some of the big things that were going to go on in the world in 2020, but I did say, I wrote a MarketWatch op-ed that said silicone will eat the world. And that was a big prediction that I made. Next five years it seems to have indeed done that. And it’s not just software. Try running software on air as I always like to say.
But anyways, it’s been a great run this last 12 months and I’m very encouraged about where things are headed. Continue to be impressed by the stuff that you and your team over at Micron are doing. Let’s have you back soon. Let’s do this again. Congratulations on all the success and keep on keeping on my friend.
Russ Meyer: All right, thanks Dan. I appreciate the time.
Daniel Newman: And everyone out there, hit that Subscribe button. Join us for all our episodes. Check out The Six Five, but I’ve got to go. So we will see you later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
