Toshiba and SanDisk announced the start of equipment installation in the New Fab 2 facility at Yokkaichi Operations.
In a press release, both companies said the new Fab 2 is primarily intended to provide the clean room space necessary to transit a significant portion of the current Yokkaichi 2D NAND capacity to 3D flash memory.
Equipment installation started in New Fab 2 in October 2015 and the facility is expected to be ready for production in the first calendar quarter of 2016.
“We look forward to fabricating 3D flash memory, BiCS FLASH, in New Fab 2,” said Seiichi Mori, corporate senior vice president of Toshiba Corporation and President and CEO of Semiconductor and Storage Products Company.
The companies also signed definitive agreements for joint manufacturing of 3D flash memory and investment in New Fab 2.
“These agreements pave the way for the highly successful SanDisk-Toshiba partnership to seamlessly transition into the 3D NAND era,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief executive officer of SanDisk.
“3D NAND enables new levels of density, scalability and performance across a broad set of customer applications. We look forward to our continued leadership in NAND flash technology and solutions.”
Recently, the Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components announced its new enterprise performance hard disk drive line, the AL14SE series. Toshiba said the latest product is designed for mission critical servers and high-performance, high-availability storage systems.
In August, SanDisk has announced its 256 Gigabit 3-bit-per-cell (X3)48-layer 3D NAND chip and also begins operations for 3D NAND pilot line in Japan in collaboration with Toshiba. The new chip is developed using 48-layer BiCS technology and will deliver compelling storage solutions for customers.
Arya MM
