Samsung is a major manufacturer of storage chips, and today, the company announced it has begun mass production of its latest NAND chips – QLC 9th-gen V-NAND with 1-Terabit storage (125GB).
Back in April, Samsung became the first company to mass-produce the 9th generation V-NAND with TLC (triple-level cell) technology. Now they are upgrading that to a quad-level cell (QLC) solution, allowing the storage of 4 bits per cell and hence a more storage-dense physical chip.
This has resulted in a twice as fast data writing speed and reduced power consumption for reading and writing data by 30% and 50%, respectively.
SungHoi Hur, Executive VP and Head of Flash Product & Technology, said the mass production comes right in time for Samsung to address the need for advanced SSD solutions in the AI era.
One of the technological breakthroughs that allowed the QLC V-NAND to happen is Channel Hole Etching. Samsung achieved a higher layer count with a double stack structure, with the area of the cells and the peripheral circuits being optimized, improving density by 86% compared with the previous generation.
Samsung adopted Designed Mold technology, which allowed uniformity and optimization of cell characteristics across and within layers. As a result, data retention performance improved by 20%, leading to enhanced product reliability.
There are also improvements in power consumption during data read and write, and the new solution doubled write performance through a technology that minimizes unnecessary actions on the chip.
The QLC V-NAND chips are generally used in SSDs. This solution will later extend to PCs, server SSDs for cloud services, and Universal Flash Storage, mostly used in smartphones.
