Micron Technology and Intel have jointly developed 3D NAND technology, the world’s highest density flash memory.
The companies claim that they will be able to get three times higher capacity than existing NAND technology.
Flash is the storage technology used inside the lightest laptops, fastest data center and in every cell phone, tablet and mobile devices.
The largest problem faced by the industry is that planar NAND is reaching its practical scaling unit. Micron and Intel aim to change this with their 3D NAND technology by keeping flash storage solutions aligned.
Intel and Micron chose to use a floating gate cell in their 3D NAND. This is the first time floating gate cell has been used with the 3D NAND. Both the companies believe that they can get better performance, reliability and increased quality by using this technology.
This new 3D NAND technology allows flash cells to be stacked vertically in 32 layers. This will achieve multilevel cell (MLC) dies of 256Gb and triple level cell (TLC) dies of 384Gb both of which still fir in a standard package.
This increase in capacity will allow SSDs to achieve a total storage capacity of 3.5TB or more and standard 2.5 inch SSDs will have a total storage capacity of 10TB or more.
The increase in capacity will increase both performance and endurance and make flash much more appealing for data centers storage.
The 256Gb MLC is sampling with selected partners today and the 384Gb will be sampling later this spring. Production is expected to start in the second half of 2015.
In March 2015, SanDisk and StorTrends introduced new data center flash storage arrays for less than $1 per gigabyte.
