Micron Announced 3D NAND Technology – Will ship in SSDs in June

Micron Announced 3D NAND Technology – Will ship in SSDs in June

 

Micron has announced their new 3D NAND Technology, which promises a massive leap in both capacity and power consumption, allowing SSDs to continue to grow in size and become cheaper to manufacture. 

The first generation of Micron’s 3D Flash technology, which uses 32 layers on a single die and can have capacities of up to 256Gbit per die for MLC memory and 384Gbit for TLC memory. Right now Samsung’s competing 3D V-NAND requires 48 layers for the same density.

One of the reason’s for Micron’s increased storage density is due to their “CMOS Under the Array” technology, which allows for the logic cells that control the NAND to be placed at the base of the 3D NAND “Skyscraper” like structure, which allows each NAND layer to include more storage capacity rather than other solutions that place control logic on each layer. 

   

The main benefits of Micron’s 3D NAND technology is that it will consume less power than existing 2D NAND and offer increased capacities per chip, allowing larger SSDs to be created in smaller form factors and with lower power consumption. 

In theory this new NAND technology should allow 256GB SSDs to fill the same price bracket as 128GB models today, after the technology has a little time to mature and to be produced in large quantities. 

Micron say that we will be seeing the first retail products using this new 3D NAND at CES this year, ans that we will be seeing shipping SSDs using this technology in soon after. 

Right now it looks like Micron has been looking at increasing capacity primarily, with no mentions of increased read and write performance mentioned by the company. It is expected that Samsung’s 3D V-NAND will offer greater read and write performance, but offer lower capacities for the same layer count, meaning that Micron’s 3D NAND will offer superior capacity per chip.   

 

You can join the discussion on Micron’s 3D NAND technology on the OC3D Forums.