Samsung announces new 256-bit 3D-NAND, stacked 48 layers high - ExtremeTech
As the 3D NAND / V-NAND technology race heats up, multiple companies are racing to demonstrate that they’ve achieved the highest product densities or best overall performance. The company is calling these new RAM chips its third generation of vertical NAND (Samsung tends to refer to its NAND structure as V-NAND rather than 3D NAND, but there’s no functional difference between the two names as far as customers are... It’s only been a year since the Korean company launched its own 32-layer 3-bit V-NAND, which means the company has increased the density of its chips by 50% in just one year. The new method of scaling NAND flash isn’t to make individual features or cells smaller, but to stack them in deeper and deeper configurations. Samsung’s new V-NAND contains 85. 3 billion cells or 256 billion bits (256Gb). That works out to 32GB per individual IC. Samsung is also claiming that the new 48-layer three-bit NAND is 30% more power efficient than the older 32-layer, 3-bit NAND... ” That implies that the company has made some voltage and power consumption improvements to the drive as well as increasing its density. Samsung also states that the new V-NAND “achieves approximately 40 percent more productivity over its 32-layer predecessor,” but whether this is a reference to yield or to performance isn’t clear from context. Source: www.extremetech.com
