Long a staple of consumer devices such as MP3 players, digital cameras, and USB flash drives, nonvolatile NAND flash memory is raising its game to respond to the new challenges posed by data-heavy Internet of Things (IoT) applications (Fig. 1). IoT applications for NAND flash cover a breathtaking range: industrial automation and Factory 4.0, connected vehicles, wearables, healthcare, aviation, plus just about any application that begins with “smart”: smart metering, smart homes, smart utilities, smart farms, smart logistics, and more.
1. NAND flash memory finds a home in numerous data-heavy IoT applications. (Source: Delkin Devices)
The smallest IoT applications—a remote edge node, for example—commonly use microcontrollers with embedded flash to store both code and data. Their storage requirements are quite modest, but with 30 billion connected devices forecast by 2020 and 75 billion by 2025, the data load rapidly increases at higher levels of the hierarchical IoT architecture: the area controller, gateway, and especially in the cloud.