On April 13, Yangtze River Storage announced that the company has skipped 96 layers and successfully developed 128-layer QLC3D NAND flash memory (model: X2-6070), and has passed verification on terminal storage products such as SSDs of multiple controller manufacturers.
The first-phase production line of the Yangtze River Storage has a monthly capacity of 100,000 pieces, and this year the capacity has been climbing. Regarding the time for mass production, Changjiang Storage revealed to Observer Network that, in line with the aforementioned capacity, 128-layer NAND flash memory will be mass-produced from the end of this year to the first half of next year.
Last September, Changjiang Storage started mass production of China’s first 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory based on the Xtacking® architecture. In this regard, the company pointed out that as the industry ’s first 128-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory, the X2-6070 has the highest unit area storage density, highest I / O transfer speed and highest single NAND flash memory chip capacity among the known models .
Chang Yi, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales of Yangtze River Storage, said: “As a newcomer in the flash memory industry, Yangtze River Storage has achieved a leap from 32 layers to 64 layers to 128 layers in just 3 years. This is thousands of years. The cohesion of people ’s sweat is also the result of collaboration between the upstream and downstream of the global industrial chain. With the advent of the Xtacking® 2.0 era, Yangtze River Storage has the determination, strength and ability to create a new business ecology so that our partners can Use their own advantages to achieve mutual benefit and win-win. ”
Also released this time is a 128-layer 512Gb TLC (3 bit / cell) flash memory chip (model: X2-9060).
Realize 1.6Gbps transmission rate
According to Changjiang Storage, thanks to the optimization of the 3D NAND control circuit and storage unit by the Xtacking® architecture, its 64-layer TLC products have performed well in terms of storage density, I / O performance and reliability, and have been widely praised after listing .
In the 128-layer series of Yangtze River storage, Xtacking® has been fully upgraded to 2.0, further releasing the potential of 3D NAND flash memory. In terms of I / O read and write performance, both the X2-6070 and X2-9060 can achieve a data transmission rate of 1.6Gbps (Gigabits / s) at 1.2V Vccq, which is the highest in the industry.
Yangtze River Storage said that because the peripheral circuits and memory cells use separate manufacturing processes, CMOS circuits can use more advanced processes. At the same time, Xtacking®2.0 also brings better scalability to 3D NAND without increasing the chip area. In the future, Changjiang Storage will work with partners to build a customized NAND business ecosystem and jointly promote the prosperity of the industry.
The company pointed out that through its continuous investment in technological innovation, it has successfully developed two products of 128 layers and established its technological innovation leadership in the storage industry. With 1.6Gb / s high-speed read and write performance and 1.33Tb high capacity, Yangtze Storage once again proved to the industry the prospective and maturity of the Xtacking® architecture through X2-6070, and explored a practical path for the future development of the 3D NAND industry.
Gong Yi said: “We believe that the 128-layer products of Yangtze River Storage will bring greater value to partners and have broad market application prospects. Among them, the 128-layer QLC version will be the first to be applied to consumer SSDs and gradually enter Enterprise-class servers, data centers and other fields to meet the diverse data storage needs of the future 5G and AI era. ”
5 times the capacity of 64-layer chip
Introduction to Yangtze River Storage, QLC is a new technical form of 3D NAND after TLC (3 bit / cell). It has the characteristics of large capacity and high density, and is suitable for read-intensive applications. Each X2-6070 QLC flash memory chip has a 128-layer three-dimensional stack, a total of more than 366.5 billion effective charge-trap (Charge-Trap) memory cells, each memory cell can store 4-bit data (bit), providing a total of 1.33 Tb storage capacity.
If the 0 or 1 of the recorded data is compared to a small “person” in the digital world, a 128-layer QLC chip with a Yangtze River storage equivalent to providing 366.5 billion rooms, each room for 4 “persons”, can accommodate a total of about 1.466 trillion ” “People” live, which is 5.33 times the capacity of the previous generation of 64-layer single chip.
Gregory Wong, founder and chief analyst of Forward Insights, a well-known market research company in the field of flash memory and SSD, believes: “QLC reduces the cost of NAND flash memory in one byte (Byte) and is more suitable as a large-capacity storage medium. Entering 512GB and above, QLC SSD’s future market increase will be very considerable. “Gregory also said:” Compared with traditional HDD, QLC SSD has more performance advantages. In the enterprise field, QLC SSD will bring servers and data centers The lower read latency makes it more suitable for AI computing, machine learning, real-time analysis and read-intensive applications in big data. In the consumer field, QLC will be the first to be popularized in large-capacity U disks, flash memory cards and SSDs . “