What are the Different Types of Solid State Memory?

Compared with magnetic disks and optical disks, solid-state memory is a memory that does not require a read-write head and does not require the storage medium to move (rotate) to read or write data.

Solid state memory

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In electronic equipment, solid-state memory is widely used. For example, the computer's motherboard BIOS is stored in solid-state memory.

In high-speed data exchange devices, because solid-state memories use transistors to store data, solid-state memories can perform very fast data exchanges at high frequencies. Examples are caches in memory and CPU.

In ultra-small devices, solid-state memory plays a pivotal role. Because of solid-state memory, our electronics can be made smaller. A large rubber MP3 player, a USB flash drive as small as a fingernail, and a memory card are all convenient for our lives.

With the improvement of the manufacturing process, the number of transistors per unit area is constantly increasing, and the data capacity per unit area is also continuously increasing. Due to the characteristics of shock resistance, low power consumption, and high speed of solid-state memories, solid-state hard disks made of solid-state memories have gradually overcome the shortcomings of early low-capacity and began to be used in large numbers for civilian use. However, due to higher costs, the price has been high.

Internationally, the field of aerospace has been developing solid-state large-capacity data storage since the early 1990s, and began to be put into commercial use in 1996. The first generation of large-capacity solid-state memory was produced by the United States TRW Satellite Development Corporation (now the United States VCI Corporation) and European ASTRIUM Corporation. For example, TRW's large-capacity solid-state memory designed for NASA's CASSINI spacecraft has a storage capacity of 2 Gbits, each storage module is 4 Mbits, the structure is a DRAM device, and the input or output data rate is 2 Mbps. ESA's CLUSTERI satellite also used related products, and the technical indicators were better than the tape drives used by similar spacecraft at the time, such as the Galileo and Hubble telescopes. With the increasing integration density of semiconductor memory chips and the development of related technologies, the storage capacity, life span, and input and output rates of solid-state large-capacity memories have developed rapidly under the conditions of constant power consumption, volume, and weight. At the beginning of the 20th century, the second generation of large-capacity solid-state memory came out. Its structure is SDRAM device, each memory module can reach 2Gbits, and the input or output data rate can reach 20Mbps. In fact, due to the constraints of integration and price, large-capacity solid-state memories now rarely use SRAM chips as the main storage medium, and NAND FLASH chips based on flash technology have occupied the mainstream position.