Nikkei Electronics Asia - October 2006
Cover Story
Instant Boot Era Arrives

Kakaku.com, the largest price comparison website in Japan, allows consumers to post their direct comments about products, and lately there has been a rising number of complaints about how long it takes to start up not only personal computers (PC), but even mobile phones and household appliances such as digital videodisc (DVD) recorders.

Compared to PCs, household appliances should be offering consumers vastly superior ease of use and user-friendly operation, but the host of functions implemented today has increased start-up time (Fig 1). The DVD recorder is an excellent example: Even the fast ones take about 20 seconds from power on to reach ready, and the slower ones can take a minute or so, on a par with PCs. A number of mobile phones running Linux require about 20 seconds before they can be used after being turned on.


As Satoru Ueda, technical marketing manager, SS Development Dept, Technology Development Group of Sony Corp of Japan explained, "Some digital TVs can take 30 seconds to start, and it seems that some manufacturers have actually received consumer complaints about it. Manufacturers are getting very serious about minimizing start-up time."

"Instant On" Era
A technology to completely resolve this problem, though, is almost here: NAND Flash memory can dramatically slash the time needed, making it possible for PCs and household appliances to start up within a few to about ten seconds. It will be the birth of the "instant on" era.

For several years now people have dreamed of introducing this technology into consumer products, but while the solution was known, NAND Flash memory was too expensive to make it possible. Now that NAND Flash memory prices are plunging, however, the dream has been realized. The price per MB for original equipment manufacture (OEM) was ¥7.4 at the beginning of 2005, but it has fallen to about ¥2 now. As a source at Fujitsu Software Technologies Ltd of Japan, a design consultant for equipment manufacturers, explained, "Equipment manufacturers are strongly demanding short start-up times, and the price of NAND Flash memory dropped just at the right time to answer their needs. It would have been impossible to accomplish a few years ago due to high prices."

Old Methods Limited
Another factor pushing the shift toward new methods is that old approaches aren't delivering start-up time reductions any more. Yoichi Yuasa, chief technical officer (CTO) and director at TriPeaks Corp of Japan, which handles development and sale of embedded Linux products, warned, "I don't think we can expect any more dramatic improvements from conventional approaches."

Both PCs and digital household appliances have managed to reduce start-up time by methods such as improving the start-up process and optimizing the operating system (OS). Windows XP, for example, uses parallel processing to read the OS code into main memory, initialize devices and other tasks. In embedded Linux the number of device drivers read in at start-up has been reduced, processing other devices after start-up has been completed, for example. These types of technology, however, cannot be expected to provide major time savings any more.

In some household appliances, like HDD recorders, the PC-standard standby mode has been adopted, allowing them to recover to normal operating status within a few seconds. This feature is not being accepted by the consumer, however.

While the power may appear to be off to the consumer in standby mode, it is still being supplied to HDD, microprocessor, memory and other components. As a result, power consumption is over 40W, not much different from the level when in full operation (Fig 2). Consumer complaints on this particular point are rising.

PCs, Digital Appliances
While NAND Flash memory is called a technology for instantaneous start-up, there are differences between application in PCs and in digital household appliances.

The major objective in PCs is to make up for the relatively slow spin-up time of the HDD. By storing the programs needed for start-up in Flash memory, program read is accomplished much more quickly. In digital appliances, on the other hand, the normal operation state is stored to Flash memory to implement instantaneous start-up. In PC terms, this is called hibernation.

In the PC industry, approaches like using NAND Flash memory-fueled solid-state drives (SSD) instead of HDDs, or combining NAND Flash memory and HDDs, are attracting rising attention.

In June 2006, Samsung Electronics Co, Ltd of Korea released the first PC to mount an SSD. The SSD not only eliminates the time required for the hard disk drive (HDD) to spin up after the power is turned on, but reads data faster than a 1.8-inch HDD to even faster system boot. While the technology is still not instantaneous start, test results by the manufacturer showed it could launch Windows XP in 15 seconds.

Technologies allowing NAND Flash memory to be used in conjunction with HDDs are being developed independently by the top two firms in the PC world: Microsoft Corp and Intel Corp, both of the US. Both technologies are expected to appear in PCs running Windows Vista, the next-generation operation system (OS) scheduled to ship in January 2007. Many PC manufacturers seem to agree with Hidenori Kinoshita, senior manager, Advanced Technology & Architecture, Notebook Development Lab of Lenovo Japan Ltd, who said "In general, we have to admit it is a very attractive development, even if it does push the cost up a bit."

Simplified Start-Up
Hibernation technology is also being utilized in digital household appliances. Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) of the US, a non-profit organization with members including firms like Sony Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, both of Japan. TriPeaks and other groups have developed the base technology, and implementations are being evaluated by equipment manufacturers now.

Hibernation makes it possible to significantly simplify the system start-up procedure (Fig 3). The boot loader merely has to load the snapshot image from NAND Flash memory into main memory and the system is up. The long times required to launch applications can be eliminated, too.

The effect of hibernation technology depends on a number of factors, including application memory footprint, making it difficult to provide solid estimates. A source at TriPeaks explained that boot time for Linux, for example, can be cut down to about 20%.

The instantaneous start-up provided by NAND Flash memory is likely to exercise a major effect on not only products like PCs and digital household appliances, but on diverse sectors. There is strong demand for instantaneous start-up in computers for factory automation (FA) and point-of-sales (POS) systems, as well as for office equipment such as copiers and copier/printers.

"New technologies adopted in PCs tend to show up in industrial computers two or three years later. Technologies capable of implementing instantaneous boot even in industrial computers are receiving a lot of attention lately," explained Takayuki Okinaga, department manager, Memory System Design Dept, System Product Business Center, System Business Operation of Hitachi ULSI Systems Co Ltd of Japan.

The price of NAND Flash memory is expected to continue to drop. One HDD manufacturer, in fact, predicts that the price per GB of memory could drop as low as US$1 in 2009.

NAND Flash: ¥100 for 1GB?
The price of NAND Flash memory has dropped precipitously in the past year. About a year ago, the OEM price for NAND Flash memory was about ¥6,000 per GB, but today it is only ¥2,000 to ¥2,200. That translates to an annual reduction of 65%. Assuming the plunge continues at this pace, the OEM price per GB of NAND Flash memory will drop under that of 1.8-inch HDDs by 2009 (Fig 4). Already HDD manufacturers are beginning to worry about the sudden drop in prices. An engineer at one major HDD manufacturer said, "It is quite possible that NAND Flash memory could hit about ¥100 per GB in 2009. That will mean tough competition for 1.8-inch HDDs."

President Akira Minamikawa of Data Garage of Japan forecast that the price of NAND Flash memory would drop by "30% to 40% annually," and when that is considered perhaps the plunge this year is merely a transient phenomenon. Still, there are two reasons why the price can be expected to continue to drop by 50% to 60% a year. The first is the appearance of a new market for NAND Flash memory to replace portable music players as the key driver, and the second is intensifying competition between semiconductor manufacturers.

PCs: Primary Driver
The trigger for the sudden drop in NAND Flash memory price over the last year was the iPod nano, the portable music player from Apple Computer Inc of the US in September 2005. The firm is said to have purchased NAND Flash memory from Samsung Electronics at the (for the time) astonishingly low price of only about ¥3,000 per GB. The iPod nano has proved a hit product, dragging down the price of NAND Flash memory. In other words, the market showed major growth in order to provide the iPod nano with a stable supply of high-capacity Flash memory.

The example shows well just how far Flash memory prices can be pushed down by high-volume demand. The notebook PC is another product likely to stimulate massive demand in the same way as the iPod nano. The notebook PC market is large, representing 60 to 70 million units/year, and the memory capacity per unit is also large. For NAND Flash memory, even a small part of this gigantic market will mean major growth, and already there are signs that the PC is developing into the key driver for the NAND Flash memory market. In June-July 2006, Samsung Electronics, Sony and other firms adopted SSDs with internal NAND Flash memory as the external storage systems for their notebook PCs.

Wider Adoption in 2008
It is yet unclear if these products will be hugely successful or not. They are probably products that will serve to better quantify market response to the technology, but at the same time SSD-equipped notebook PCs will unquestionably trumpet features not found in conventional HDD designs. Whether or not SSD PCs will be able to establish a market niche for themselves will depend on how highly these characteristics are valued by consumers.

Kazuya Suzuki, senior program manager, Section No 3, Department No 2, VAIO Business Div of Sony discussed the company's expectations of NAND Flash memory: "Compared to HDDs, NAND Flash memory offers good impact resistance and low power consumption. The OS boots fast. There are all sorts of great features. As long as it is not more than a couple of times more expensive than the HDD, we believe that consumers will pay for the improvements." If NAND Flash memory prices continue to drop 50% to 60% a year, the SSD will only be two or three times more expensive than a 1.8-inch HDD in about 2008.

It is also likely that NAND Flash memory will be tapped for use in other applications such as car navigation systems and camcorders (Fig 5). Equipment like this demands external storage capacities of at least 20GB to 40GB, and if the price of NAND Flash memory keeps dropping at 50% to 60% annually, 20GB of storage will be about ¥7,000 to ¥11,000 in 2008, and 40GB about ¥14,000 to ¥22,000. These prices are approaching the level of HDDs, and are likely to lead to widespread adoption in many products.

Prices Driven Down
Another factor pushing NAND Flash memory prices down is competition between semiconductor manufacturers. The market is already packed with vendors, including Samsung Electronics, Toshiba Corp of Japan, Hynix Semiconductor Inc of the US, STMicroelectronics, Qimonda AG of Germany and IM Flash Technologies LLC of the US. The only path to survival will be to command a large share of the market, and all the firms are expected to push ahead with major production expansions. If this causes supply to surpass demand, the bottom will fall out of the market.

It is difficult to forecast the future of the NAND Flash memory market, but it seems clear there is plenty of opportunity for major price drops in the next few years.

by Yasushi Uchida,
Hirotaka Ito

Websites:
Apple Computer:www.apple.com
CELF:www.celinuxforum.org
Hitachi ULSI Systems:www.hitachi-ul.co.jp
Hynix Semiconductor:www.hynix.com
IM Flash Technologies:www.imftech.com
Intel:www.intel.com
Kakaku.com:kakaku.com
Lenovo Japan:www.lenovo.com/jp
Microsoft:www.microsoft.com
Qimonda:www.qimonda.com
Samsung Electronics:www.samsung.com
Sharp:sharp-world.com
Sony:www.sony.net
STMicroelectronics:www.st.com
Toshiba:www.toshiba.com

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