Samsung goes big on storage with 256Gb V-NAND chips

The higher density chips could easily be implemented to the current line-up of SSDs and double their capacities.

Having released a 2 terabyte SSD last month, Samsung has also been making efforts to expand the market for multi-terabyte SSDs.

The South Korean tech behemoth was the world’s first to launch 3D V-NANDs last year in August.

Samsung is the only producer in the world to produce V-NAND flash that stacks the cells vertically in a microscopic skyscraper, thus breaking free of the scaling limit for existing NAND flash technology. The new memory has double the density of the 128-Gb V-NAND. But now before you go belittling Samsung’s announcement because of the numbers, what the consumer electronics company came up with is still a notable achievement.

Samsung Electronics’ 48-layer 256Gb vertical NAND flash memory.

Increasing data density has a simple, obvious, and important impact; it allows the creation of drives that store more in less space. It continues to push out new versions of these chips, hoping to maintain control over the memory market.

Here’s the gee-whiz bit: the 48-layer chips use 3D Charge Trap Flash in a structure with 1.8 billion channel holes through the 48 layers, with a total of 85.3 billion cells.

“With the introduction of our third generation V-NAND flash memory to the global market, we can now provide the best advanced memory solutions with even higher efficiency based on improved performance, power utilization and manufacturing productivity, thereby accelerating the growth of the high-performance and high-density SSD markets”, Jun Young-hyun, president of Samsung’s memory business, said. They each can store 3 bits of data, resulting 256 billion bits of data, in other words, 256Gb on a chip no larger than the tip of a finger. During production, the new chip also achieves approximately 40 percent more productivity over its 32-layer predecessor, bringing much enhanced cost competitiveness to the SSD market, while mainly utilizing existing equipment. Although this advancement will eventually also benefit consumers, Samsung has its eyes primarily on the enterprise and data storage markets.