Thanks for taking interest in reading the comments.

They aren't really timed to the audio, but will be spaced 4sec apart.

To start, this video takes the #1 position for the most script revisions.

By the end, I was at revision 40 of the script, just because it was such

a complex topic that needed, and needed a good amount of scaffolding.

A lot of complex details were cut out, so it's a good thing you're here reading

the creator comments because we'll get to every detail that got cut from 39 revisions of script writing.

Also this was the first script where I included a sponsor, so I hope you didn't

mind the sponsored segments much. I tried to make them educational and integrated into the content.

So one confusing detail is that transistors usually operate under one set

of ON/OFF conditions, in order to perform MOSFET logic. Whereas

these memory cells have three operational states, 1) Writing to a cell

2) Reading from a cell, and 3) Erasing a cell.

So, 95% of THIS video is about reading from a cell.

Versus the previous video on quantum tunneling is 95% about writing to a cell.

Don't mix up the operational modes of writing vs reading from a cell.

I'll get to erasing a cell in a future episode. But that video will be in a slightly different format.

So: I might as well lay this out here: 1 bit per cell = Single Level Cell [SLC]

2 Bits Per Cell = Multi Level Cell [MLC] 3 Bits Per Cell = Triple Level Cell [TLC]

4 Bits Per Cell = Quad Level Cell [QLC]

Quad level cells are more cutting edge, however there is a huge trade-off.

With QLC you can fit more bits, but 1) it takes a little longer to read information.

2) It takes a TON of time longer to write information to each cell

3) The threshold voltages are a lot closer so there is a

higher liklihood of the data becoming corrupt more quickly.

So TLC charge trap flash is the most common type of memory cell.

Moving on, his enterprise SSD has 18 chips, and in each chip there are 8 or 16 die.

One die is the layout of charge trap flash cells that we showed earlier and will show in a few seconds.

FYI- there are 300 pints in this board to board connector... I counted...

30 x 10... I didn't count every pin- that would be silly.

Furthermore, in that SSD there are a set of DRAM and a pretty powerful controller.

I say 100's of millions here, because there is a wide range storage capacities

from smartphone to smartphone. This layout is for a single 1TB chip

that is stacked 16 chips tall. But if you have a phone with a smaller capacity

then the # of cells in each die is in the 100s of millions range.

The calculations aren't that difficult overall, but the issue comes down

to the variation in height, width, and depth of the die,

how many die are in each microchip, and then how many microchips are

in the particular SSD. But overall it should be closer to

170-200ish billion memory cell range for a 64 GB single chip.

Let's move on and briefly talk about this structure

First, this structure isn't hollow but rather the empty areas are surrounded by insulating material.

The indent of the charge trap helps to prevent charges from leaking from one celll

to the cell above it. Furthermore the charge trap is composed of silicon nitride

which is a dielectric itself, and is not conductive to having charges flow.

The main difference between floating gate transistors and charge trap [CT] transistors

IS in fact the fact that in [CT] transistors the charge trap is a dielectric material.

The channel is a lightly n-doped polysilicon.

The core filler is also a high K- dielectric.

The core filler is actually critical because by using it, the channel becomes

a hollow cylinder, or a 'macaroni' shape. This makes it such that the charge trap and gate

have a stronger influence, and better control of the the channel

Also 'macaroni' shape is the technical word I found in the textbooks.

Okay, so for the next few minutes I'm gonna discuss a pretty significant

"inaccuracy" I told throughout this entire episode.

The inaccuracy is that the charge trap flash memory cell operates

more like a depletion-mode N-Channel MOSFET.

And what I'm describing here is an enhancement-mode N-Channel MOSFET.

If you don't know the difference, then you don't have to worry, but I'll explain it anyways.

In essence, in a charge trap transistor, and in depletion mode mosfets, the channel is

ON when 0V is applied to the gate.

In this graph I don't have numbers along the axis, but,

if the 0V line were in the middle of the ON side, then this graph would be

accurate, and when a negative volt is applied to the gate, the channel turns off.

So why did I use this inaccuracy as the example? Well, the most common

transistor is an Enhancement Mode N channel MOSFET, and the target audience

for this video are high school students who may know what a transistor is, but

for certain have no clue about enhancement mode vs depletion mode

and have no clue about P vs N channels mosfets. So I stuck with the most

common mosfet as the starting point, which is the N-Channel Enhancement

MOSFET. And along that point, going into explaining ohmic regions vs. saturation

regions would be even more confusing. If you want to learn more about that get an EE degree.

BUT, if I were to talk about this charge trap transistor accurately, the lesson

would go something like this:

Normally, electrons CAN flow through the channel.

When 0V are applied to the gate, and there are no charges on the

charge trap, electrons can flow through the channel.

But, when electrons are added onto the charge trap, these electrons

inhibit the flow of electrons through the channel.

However, when a positive voltage is applied to the gate, this voltage

negates the negative charges on the charge trap,

thus allowing the electrons to be able to flow through the channel again.

And when even more electrons are added to the charge trap

that means an even larger positive voltage on the gate is required

to negate the negative charges on the charge trap.

That's it. This would have been an equally useful and thorough

explaination, however, it would confuse viewers who have learned about

the basic mosfet, which is normally OFF when 0V is applied to the gate.

And this lesson would have less of a lesson around threshold voltages.

Okay, so lets get to specific voltages.

In this setup, of a single level cell without any charges on the CT,

the threshold voltage is somewhere around -0.5V.

When electrons are placed on the CT, the threshold voltage shifts to around 3V.

In order to write to a memory cell, in essence pulling charges

from the channel into the CT, around 18-20V is required on the gate.

Which is a LOT higher voltage than when just reading information.

Furthermore, when you write to a cell, first you try to pull the charges

through the tunnel oxide with 19ish V. And then you verify the stored number

of electrons by applying the two separate threshold voltages.

But when we get to TLC, or three bits of information, the writing voltage

stays the same, but the threshold voltages are divided up from 0-4.5ish V.

Similarly, after every step of writing to a memory cell, each memory cell's value

for that attempted writing step is verified. It's easier to show with a graph

which I'll do in a future episode.

Another key detail is that the gates between all the memory cells in

a page are connected to one another, and a page is 40,000ish memory cells.

So when writing or reading to a cell, all 40,000 memory cells undergo the

same operation. [Side note, when erasing, and entire block is erased]

However this poses a problem- how is a single charge trap prevented from

being written to, or specifically prevented from having electrons

tunneled through the oxide from the channel and into the charge trap?

Well, to prevent writing, the channel is biased to around 8V. And this

makes the gate to channel potential only 12V, which isn't strong enough to

tunnel the electrons. So as an example, when writing to a cell, the Gate is

driven to 18V for a ~100 microseconds. If a memory cell doesn't want its charge

trap to have electrons on it, the channel of that memory cell is biased to 8 V.

Next, the gate voltage is dropped to 0V, and each channel is checked whether

its on or off to verify that the electrons moved as expected onto the appropriate

charge traps. Next, the voltage is set to 18.3V, and again, the cells that don't want

to be changed have their channel biased to 8V. And then the voltage

is dropped down to the corresponding expected threshold voltage.

And this process repeats over and over, until each memory cell has the

desired number of electrons set into the charge trap. This is a long process, and

is even longer when dealing with QLC, or quad level cells.

So onto the inverted assignment, and why no electrons is a 0, and some electrons

are a 1. I asked a few scientists and engineers this, and they replied that it was

with this generation of technology, it is mostly arbitrary. In fact, for TLC the

assignment from lowest threshold voltage to highest threshold voltage

goes 111, 011, 001, 101, 100, 000, 010, 110. With 111 = Erased and

110 = the most electrons in the charge trap.

The order of 111, 011, 001... follows a gray code where each subsequent

value has only 1 bit changed, however there are a lot of different ways

this grey code could be ordered, and with that different companies follow

different binary schemes. The purpose of the grey code is to help improve

reliability, and error checking.

But overall it doesn't have to be a specific order. Or at least that's what

I found in my research.

One interesting detail about these enterprise SSDs, is that they

have a DWPD spec, which stands for daily writes per day.

The 'Enterprise Write Intensive SSD' can have capacities up to 3.2TB, and

have 10 DWPD, with a warranty of 5 years.

That means that for 5 straight years, this SSD can be writing and replacing

its 3.2 TB of information, 10 times a day.

That's about 58.4 Petabytes of data written and erased over 5 years!

I know these SSDs are used for transactional data, but that's just

a ton of write / erase cycles for a single SSD to perform.

Another detail not entirely discussed in this episode is that the data

written to and read from a single SSD is distributed relatively evenly throughout

all the chips and die on that SSD. To explain that better. As mentioned before,

In that KIOXIA enterprise SSD there were 18 chips, and in each chip theres

a stack of lets say 8 die [approx] , or 8 layouts like the massive layout we are showing.

When you take a video, that video is broken up and evenly distributed across

those 144 [8x18] die. You would think that the entire video should be

stored on a single die, but in order to erase/ write and read significantly faster, the

single file is chopped up into block size pieces and stored across all of the die.

As mentioned before, in a single die, only one page can be written to or read

at any given time. But when the data gets written to or read from 144 die,

that means there are 144 pages written to or read from simultaneously.

That being said, a small portion of each die is assigned to error correcting code

so that if any of the die has a failure, then none

of the data is lost. In fact these enterprise SSDs have a spec

that say 2 of the entire chips can undergo failures, and all your data

will still maintain its full integrity. That's actually why there are 18 chips

instead of 16 [where 16 is a power of 2, and a lot of things in computers

are found in powers of 2].

Moving on- just to quickly repeat in case someone joined these creators

comments a little bit late. The order of binary assignment to threshold voltages

of 111, 110, 101, 100, 011, 010, 001, 000, where 111 is no electrons

is inaccurate. It should be 111, 011, 001, 101, 100, 000, 010, 110 as an example.

But this assignment would be hella confusing for most people, and it would

open up a set of additional questions that I couldn't really dive into in this episode.

Also, as for the specs listed above, there are a wide range of different

specs for SSDs in terms of capacity, price, read and write speeds,

reliability, daily writes per day, power consumption, form factor.

In general, enterprise SSDs cost more, and have higher read write speeds, and

better reliability. Also another question is, if SSDs have a 5 year warranty [typically]

why would anyone ever get a 30TB SSD? Especially considering 30TB

would usually be used for long term storage. The answer is that there are

a good number of applications, specifically in research, simulation, or

transactions, that require incredible amounts of storage space,

but don't use that storage space in the form of static long term files.

As for dimensions, the entire cell is somewhere in the range of

160 - 200 nanometers wide. However I don't have exact numbers as these are

very closely held secrets. On each side, the dielectric between the

control gate and charge trap is around 15 nm. The charge trap of Silicon nitride

is 50ish nanometers, the tunnel oxide is 8 nanometers, and then the channel

is around 10ish nanometers. Maybe one day I'll work with a company

who shares revealing more details, but until then I just gotta go from what

I can find in text books.

Anywho, thanks a ton for reading these creator's comments

If you have any further question post them in the comments below!!

Also, as mentioned in a previous episodes creator comments

this technology is not designed and created by aliens, there is a long list of

companies and progressive developments throughout the past 70 years.

Also if aliens did give us this technology

why didn't they also give us the technology to create

giant Jaegers [giant robots].