Samsung Electronics has started producing its fifth-generation V-NAND memory chips with the fastest data transfers.
The speed for transmitting data between storage and memory over Samsung’s 256 Gb V-NAND has reached 1.4-gigabits per second (Gbps), a 40-percent increase from its 64-layer predecessor.
The energy efficiency of Samsung’s new V-NAND remains comparable to that of the 64-layer chip, primarily because the operating voltage has been reduced from 1.8 volts to 1.2 volts.
Samsung said the new V-NAND has the fastest data write speed to date at 500-microseconds (μs), which represents about a 30-percent improvement over the write speed of the previous generation.
The response time to read-signals has been significantly reduced to 50μs, Samsung said in a statement.
Samsung’s fifth-generation V-NAND has more than 90 layers of 3D charge trap flash (CTF) cells. These channel holes, which are only a few hundred-nanometers (nm)-wide, contain more than 85 billion CTF cells that can store three bits of data each.
Samsung increased manufacturing productivity by more than 30 percent due to enhancements in the V-NAND’s atomic layer deposition process. The technique allows the height of each cell layer to be reduced by 20 percent, prevents crosstalk between cells and increases the efficiency of the chip’s data processing.
Kye Hyun Kyung, executive vice president of Flash Product and Technology at Samsung Electronics, said: “We are preparing to introduce 1-terabit (Tb) and QLC (quad-level cell) offerings to our V-NAND lineup that will continue to drive momentum for next-generation NAND memory solutions.”
Samsung targets sectors such as supercomputing, enterprise servers and the latest mobile applications such as premium smartphones.
