Although no actual products have been released yet, Samsung Electronics has now announced that it has started mass production of its 236-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips, which the company has named the 8th generation V-NAND.
The new generation of memory chips can deliver transfer speeds of 2400MTps, and when used with high-end hosts, it can make consumer SSDs easily exceed 12GBps.
According to the report, the 8th generation V-NAND is available in a 1Tb (128GB) solution. Samsung Electronics has not disclosed the size and actual density of the IC, but they are calling it the highest bit density in the industry.
Samsung claims that its next-generation 3D NAND flash memory can increase single-crystal productivity by 20 percent compared to existing flash chips of the same capacity, which further reduces costs (at the same yield), which could mean that everyone can expect to buy a cheaper SSD of the same capacity.
The company did not reveal the architecture of the new product, but based on the images provided, we can assume it is a dual-plane 3D NAND chip.
As market demand for denser, higher-capacity storage drives higher V-NAND layer counts, Samsung employs advanced 3D compression technology to reduce surface area and height while avoiding the inter-cell interference that typically occurs during compression,” said SungHoi Hur, executive vice president of flash memory products and technologies at Samsung Electronics. ” “Our 8th generation V-NAND will help meet rapidly growing market demand and better position us to deliver more differentiated products and solutions that will be the foundation for future storage innovation.”
In the middle of this year, Samsung launched its eighth and ninth-generation V-NAND products, as well as its fifth-generation DRAM products. Prior to that, the company currently offered 512 Gb triple-level cell (TLC) products for V-NAND.
Other upcoming DRAM solutions from Samsung include 32 Gb DDR5 solutions, 8.5 Gbps LPDDR5X DRAM and 36 Gbps GDDR7 DRAM.
Samsung claims for its V-NAND that by 2030, it will have built 1,000 layers of V-NAND. To achieve this goal, Samsung is transitioning from its current TLC architecture to a quad-level cell (QLC) architecture to increase density and enable more layers.
Samsung will also invest more resources in DRAM R&D to investigate new architectures and materials, such as High-K, to help scale DRAM beyond 10nm. The company intends to further develop other DRAM solutions, such as processing in memory (PIM).
