Mass Digital Storage
Digital storage technology is a key ingredient in all computer systems, from computing in large and small data centers, at the edge of networks and in endpoint processors used in civic infrastructure, factories, agriculture, homes and various wearable and embedded devices. Digital storage is where data lives. The amount of digital data generated is growing exponentially, driven by the increasing use of various sensors, including video cameras, the use of large training sets for various types of artificial intelligence training and once trained, for the use of AI models for inference from the data center to the edge and finally connected endpoint.
Although most of this data is transitory and not kept longer term, its use generates data that is retained for longer or shorter periods of time, driving the demand for more digital storage. As with other computing technologies, in order to enable this greater storage of data, digital storage is often distributed across a hierarchy of technologies that trade off performance (both bandwidth and latency) with the cost of storage. In addition, endurance and the expected life of the storage media are important characteristics that disadvantage or favor mass digital storage technologies, particularly for high use and archival applications. There are many types of digital storage technology, including new non-volatile solid state storage technologies. These technologies continue to evolve, generally lowering the price to storage the growing volume of digital content. Many of these technologies compete with each other for various applications (e.g HDDs and SSDs). This roadmap will discuss the drivers, enablers and challenges for various digital storage technologies including NAND flash memory and solid state drives (SSDs) as well as other SSDs built on other non-volatile memory technologies, hard disk drives (HDDs), magnetic tape and various types of optical storage and optical disc recording technology. We also intend to include DNA storage for the first time.
The roadmap will also look at the same factors for various non-volatile solid-state memories that are in more limited commercial production and in use as stand-alone memory as well as memory built into embedded devices such as Systems on Chip (SoCs), including magnetic random-access memory (MRAM), resistive random-access memory (RRAM), ferroelectric random-access memory (FRAM) and phase change memory (PCM) and other solid state non-volatile memory technologies that are not yet in commercial production.
