Samsung Starts Volume Production of World’s First 3D Vertical NAND Flash Memory
Samsung announced that it has developed and begun mass producing a new kind of NAND flash that could shake up the storage industry by substantially increasing the reliability, scaling, and performance of flash. The product is three dimensional vertical NAND (or 3D V-NAND), and it’s slated for use in both the consumer and enterprise markets in embedded storage and SSDs.
By using a vertical cell design with 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology and a “vertical interconnect process technology” that links the cell array, Samsung enabled a single-chip density of 128Gb. In a release, the company described the technology by saying, “To do this, Samsung revamped its CTF architecture, which was first developed in 2006. In Samsung’s CTF-based NAND flash architecture, an electric charge is temporarily placed in a holding chamber of the non-conductive layer of flash that is composed of silicon nitride (SiN), instead of using a floating gate to prevent interference between neighboring cells."
Samsung claims that V-NAND can offer a 2x-10x increase in reliability and double the write performance of the average 10nm floating gate flash memory, and the technology supports stacking as many as 24 layers vertically.
By using a vertical cell design with 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology and a “vertical interconnect process technology” that links the cell array, Samsung enabled a single-chip density of 128Gb. In a release, the company described the technology by saying, “To do this, Samsung revamped its CTF architecture, which was first developed in 2006. In Samsung’s CTF-based NAND flash architecture, an electric charge is temporarily placed in a holding chamber of the non-conductive layer of flash that is composed of silicon nitride (SiN), instead of using a floating gate to prevent interference between neighboring cells."
Samsung claims that V-NAND can offer a 2x-10x increase in reliability and double the write performance of the average 10nm floating gate flash memory, and the technology supports stacking as many as 24 layers vertically.
