Have you ever wondered how your smartphone can store countless pictures, songs, or videos? Or, have you wondered when you download a podcast to your smartphone, where does it actually get stored? In this video, we will open up your smartphone and take a look at the inside of the memory storage microchip. This same microchip is also used to store data in solid-state drives, or SSDs in your computer, in tablets, and inside flash drives. The technology is called VNAND or V-NAND, and its incredible how engineers were able to fit such an insane amount of memory storage capacity in such a small space.

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Written, animated, and edited- Teddy Tablante
Twitter: @teddytablante
Voice Over- Phil Lee

Timestamps:
0:00 — Intro into SSDs
2:06 — Example of Saving a Picture
4:17 — Pixel Calculations
5:19 — Single Memory Cell
7:59 — Vertical Strings and Pages
10:34 — Control Gates of VNAND
12:00 — Calculations of Example Array
13:09 — True size of an SSD microchip
14:50 — Overall chip in an SSD
16:07 — Outro
16:32 — Creators comments
16:54 — Future Episodes

This video is part of a series that intends to thoroughly explain how SSDs, and more specifically how VNAND works. These are the episodes in the series:
1) [18min] Overview on how SSDs / VNAND / Smartphone storage works.
2) [3min] Quick/Abridged episode of the overview
3) How charge trap flash works. (details on a single memory cell)
4) How strings of memory cells work (details on a stack of memory cells)
5) How a massive array of memory cells are organized. (Terabit Cell Array Transistor, TCAT)
6) How is VNAND manufactured?
7) Possible episode on an analogy using a city