In the shape of a pilot project Western Digital, who recently bought out Toshiba’s NAND foundries, is starting to ramp up the production of 64 layer 3D NAND flash memory. The new generation of NAND flash memory chips goes by the name BiCS3 and should increase the storage density per chip from 256 Gbit to 512 Gbit.


Back in December last year Western Digital and Toshiba have announced that they’re starting to ship their 256 Gbit NAND Flash chips, while proclaiming that they have the smallest 256 Gbit chips in the industry. What’s still unclear is how many Gigabyte per area they’re capable of storing.

In an effort to push the storage capacity per chip even further Western Digital and Toshiba now want to become the first player in the game achieving 512 Gbit using 64 layer 3D NAND flash. Since 3D NAND still requires significant investments it’s expected that when 64 layers have been reached, break even is going to be achieved.

Apparently the likes of Samsung and SK Hynix are not sleeping. While Samsung initially planned to release their 64 layer 3D NAND chips during December last year they’re obviously late. In the case of SK Hynix we might even see 72 layer NAND chips soon.

As of today the market is short of NAND Flash chips and as a result the prices are high. If 64 or even 72 layer 3D NAND is going to be widely available soon that would mean there is a realistic chance prices are going to decrease again.




Source: Techpowerup