Nand Evolution Of International Memory Factory

Toshiba believes there is still plenty of room for innovation and development before its 3D NAND BiCS non-volatile memory products become mainstream in the market. Agence France-Presse

According to Search Storage and Forbes, Toshiba's low-latency memory product, called XL-Flash, was developed by Toshiba's single-layer storage unit (SLC) 3D NAND exclusive technology, BiCS, to provide optimization for multi-layer cells (MLC).
Shigeo Ohshima, a Toshiba Solid State Disk (SSD) application engineer, claims that XL-Flash has excellent low latency performance, with write latency performance 10 times faster than traditional TLC memory. In addition, it is completely compatible with traditional memory in command protocols and interfaces without additional processing. Ohshima also said that before non-volatile memory products such as ReRAM and MRAM were put into mass production and became mainstream applications, Toshiba still had a lot of room for innovation with 3D NAND BiCS technology.

Ohshima pointed out that the combination of XL-Flash and higher-density QLC memory can handle a wide range of application loads and improve overall system performance compared to traditional storage architectures such as DRAM and hard disk (HDD). The performance gap between XL-Flash and QLC memory is much smaller than that between DRAM and hard disk, and even though XL-Flash is much smaller than DRAM. Slow, but lower cost and higher capacity.

The industry sees Toshiba and Samsung Electronics pushing XL-Flash and Z-NAND individually as a response to the 3D XPoint developed by Intel and Micron. David Floyer, Wikibon's chief technology officer, believes that Toshiba XL-Flash and Samsung Z-NAND will not be as effective as Optane's Solid State Disk (SSD), but will still be fairly close. Objective Analysis Semiconductor Analyst Jim Handy believes that XL-Flash and Z-NAND data will read at similar speeds to Optane.

Mainland memory vendors Changjiang Storage announced at the summit a new Xtacking technology architecture for 3D NAND that has the potential to improve efficiency and bit density. They hope to challenge existing global NAND Flash manufacturers by claiming to improve efficiency and I/O speed, reduce bare crystal size, increase bit density and shorten bit density. Development time. Yangtze Storage Chief Executive Yang Shining claims that Xtacking can achieve I / O speeds comparable to DDR4 without any restrictions.

SK Hynix announced its latest NAND Flash technology, named 4D NAND, at the summit. It claims to use charge capture (CTF) design, combined with its own CTF design and Periphery Under Cell (PUC) technology, to place peripheral circuits under arrays rather than around them, so as to increase storage density and reduce storage costs. Cost. But in fact, this is not the first technology in the industry, Intel and Meguiar, Samsung have this kind of technology, that is, the so-called "CuA" design, so industry analysts believe that naming 4D NAND is just a marketing gimmick.