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Date:  Wed, November 05, 2014
Time:  1:30pm-2:30 pm
Location:  Holmes Hall 389
Speaker:  Robert E. Fontana, Jr., Senior Research Scientist, IBM System Technology Group

 Abstract:
This talk will detail a 6 year “landscape” history of storage memory characteristics at the market level, i.e. component revenue, component shipments in petabytes (PB), and component cost in $/GB to provide the audience with background elements that impact clients’ decisions for present and future storage memory usage.  
    
In particular volumetric density trends (TB/in3) for storage components will be discussed.  Memory storage components, i.e. hard disk drives (HDD), tape cartridges, solid state drives (SSD) using Flash NAND chips, and now optical cartridges using Blu-ray disks (BD), have provided annual increases in memory capacity by decreasing the area of the memory cell associated with the technology of these components.  The ability to reduce bit cell sizes is now being limited by nano-technology physics so that in order for component manufacturers to continue to increase component capacity, volumetric enhancements to the storage component are now being introduced.  Volumetric enhancements include adding more tape per cartridge, more disk platters per drive, and more layers of memory cells on the silicon NAND substrate or on the optical disk substrate.  This talk describes these volumetric strategies, projects density trends at the bit cell level, and projects volumetric trends at the component level in order to forecast future component capacity trends for memory storage components over the next 5 to 10 years. 
 
Biography:
Dr. Robert E. Fontana, Jr. is a Senior Research Scientist within the tape storage business unit of the IBM System Technology Group.  He received his BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT.  His technical activities concentrate on thin film processing techniques for fabricating magnetic devices: Texas Instruments with magnetic bubbles, IBM with thin film heads, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies with novel magnetic nano-structures, and now presently IBM with tape heads.  His IBM process group fabricated the magnetic recording industry’s first magneto-resistive thin film heads. He transferred research processing strategies for three generations of magneto-resistive thin film heads to manufacturing applications.  Dr. Fontana’s current interests are advanced tape heads, storage class memories, and nano-processing.