SK Hynix launches the World’s First CTF-based 4D NAND Flash
SK Hynix launches the World’s First CTF-based 4D NAND Flash
Don’t let the 4D name fool you; this is still 3d NAND. What has changed is that SK Hynix has paired their 3D NAND designs with PUC (Periphery Under Cell) technology, creating a single, larger stack of circuitry. Thank of it this way. Imagine a large residential tower block and a smaller car park beside it. The tower block is 3D NAND, and the car park is the Periphery, control circuits that sit at the edge of NAND chips. SK Hynix’s design builds the tower black/NAND on top of the car park, allowing the whole structure to take up less die area. Â
With this design change, SK Hynix has decreased the die area of their NAND chips by 30%, which will allow more NAND dies to be created on a single wafer, increasing the company’s manufacturing productivity. When combined with their new 96-layer NAND technology, SK Hynix expects wafer productivity yo increase by 49% when compared to their 4th Generation 72-layer 3D NAND.Â
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When compared to their older 4th Generation (V4) NAND, the company’s V5 4D NAND offers a significant increase in read/write performance as well as higher levels of power efficiency, with data I/O reaching levels as high as 1,200Mb/s at 1.2V.Â
Within the next year, SK-Hynix plans to introduce 1TB client SSDs their new 96-layer 512Gb 4D NAND with their own controllers and firmware. Beyond that, the company plans to roll out 96-layer 1Tb TLC and QLC memory chips in 2019.Â
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Moving forward, SK Hynix expects to stack their 4D/3D NAND to achieve greater heights, hoping to reach over 500 layers in time. Accomplishing such a feat will deliver more than a 5x increase in storage density over today’s 96-layer solutions, though the company has not set a timeframe for when they expect to reach this goal. Â
You can join the discussion on SK Hynix’s 96-layer 4D CTF NAND Flash on the OC3D Forums.  Â