Everything that involves NAND flash memory has grown to what is today a huge business and throughout the past few years the big names such as Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix have been investing heavily in research and development. One of the results of this is that today we have consumer SSDs with up to 2TB capacity due to 48-layer 3D NAND flash chips. So far it looks like Samsung is perfectly on track to soon launch the next generation of SSDs due to 64-layer 3D NAND with even higher capacities.


Samsung has announced that they’ve begun volume production of their 4th generation 64-layer 256Gb V-NAND flash memory. These chips will be used in future servers, PCs as well as in mobile phones. Samsung plans to cover more than 50% of their monthly production by the end of this year using the new 64-layer chips. In theory the new chips will allow for a 30% increase in capacity and a 20% increase in reliability. Apart from that power consumption can be decreased to to the fact, that the voltage can be reduced from 3.3V to 2.5V.

In terms of performance Samsung communicates that the new chips offer a page program time that is 1.5x faster than the previous generation (tPROG 500 microseconds). Nevertheless, Samsung is planning on advancing the technology even further coming up with 1Tb V-NAND, which will feature 90 layers.




Source: Techpowerup