Western Digital, together with Kioxia, announced yet another innovation in the field of flash memory: the world’s highest capacity to date in a flash memory chip—a 2Tb 3D QLC NAND Flash memory die. This innovation break-through hits where it matters in the data storage industry by potentially setting a new pace for the manufacture of higher and more cost-effective solid-state drives.
The 2Tb 3D QLC NAND die realizes outstanding density and efficiency for storage. For instance, whereas a 256GB 3D QLC NAND device is fabricated with a single memory IC, a 1TB SSD will now require only four of them, and a 2TB SSD, eight. That kind of drastic reduction in the number of memory ICs involved significantly cuts the cost of production, which could further bring down the selling price to consumers reaching out for high-capacity SSDs. This would also enable a single chip package to host a 4TB SSD if it were a 16-die package.
How these high capacities are realized with Western Digital and Kioxia’s new 3D NAND technology is essentially through advanced scaling and waferbonding. The companies have introduced unique processes and architectures that would enable advanced lateral scaling—producing more capacity at an optimized cost with fewer layers. One of the some key innovations here is the newly developed technology for bonding CMOS directly to an array, or CBA. This method involves making every wafer of the CMOS and every cell array separately under optimum conditions and then bonding them to enhance the bit density and increase the NAND I/O speeds.
This new technology further guarantees huge performance gains. The 2TB 3D QLC NAND die, as described by the manufacturers, will perform duties with an I/O speed 50 percent faster than that of other rivaled NANDs, while operationally Epstein reducing power to program a gigabyte of data. This efficiency is not only critical to consumer electronics but also to many other applications, including data centers, needing both capacity and high performances.
With Western Digital and Kioxia planning to mass-produce the innovative 3D NAND memory, it can meet the growing demand for high-capacity and cost-effective storage solutions. This is going to redefine the economics associated with the production of SSDs, making high-capacity drives more reachable and very affordable to many users and applications.
