March 15, 2010 -- The Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) Working Group has published the new ONFI 3.0 standard. By using the non-volatile DDR2 (NV-DDR2) interface, the newly ratified standard reaches speeds of up to 400MBps, doubling the current NAND interface transfer rates.

The ONFI 3.0 standard details the interface and infrastructure that ONFI's more than 100 members can employ to develop products that deliver the industry's fastest NAND interface. Improvements in ONFI 3.0's NAND interface speeds will also enable future NAND controllers to achieve similar performance with half the number of channels, providing both a cost and space savings, which are key requirements for solid-state drive (SSD) design.

The ONFI 3.0 incorporates a sophisticated die-selection feature that reduces the number of chip-enable (CE) pins, which in turn lowers the number of controller pins making PCB routing more efficient. Reducing the number of CE pins is especially important for SSDs, providing a significant cost reduction and allowing the extra pins to be assigned to other applications within the system.

"The enabling of fast ONFI 3.0 NAND is something a controller company can greatly benefit from," says K. S. Pua, Chairman and CEO of Phison Electronics. "Our customers are eager to achieve higher speeds in their USB 3.0 and SATA SSD products. The adoption of ONFI 3.0 would mean keeping up with the increasing bandwidth offered by these host interfaces, bringing the overall performance of NAND applications to an outstanding level."

Like previous ONFI standards, ONFI 3.0 is designed with simplicity in mind for NAND-based devices and is backwards compatible with previous ONFI standards. In future versions, ONFI 3.0 will also support the ECC Zero (EZ-NAND) interface, which removes burden of the host controller having to keep pace with the fast changing ECC requirements of NAND technology.

Simplifying adoption with broad ecosystem support

"The new ONFI 3.0 technology supporting interface transfer rates of up to 400MBps is a key NAND capability to support future SSD design," said Knut Grimsrud, Intel fellow and director of storage architecture. "With this interface performance scaling, ONFI NAND will play an important role in SSD compute development, especially for high-performance computing applications where speed is paramount."

"The ONFI 3.0 specification is a further step in the definition of a long-term roadmap for faster NAND Flash memory interfaces," said Roberto Colecchia, Marketing Manager at Spansion. "Spansion has contributed to the design of this specification which we believe will be able to support the growing demand for faster data transfer required by several market segments."