According to foreign media reports, Micron has begun mass production of the world's first 176-layer 3D NAND flash memory, achieving industry-leading density and performance. The new 3D NAND enhances storage capabilities for mobile, automotive, client and data center applications. Micron said that Micron's new 176-layer technology and advanced architecture represents the group's breakthrough, enabling a huge gain in application performance across data centers, smart edge devices and mobile devices through a series of storage usage scenarios.
Scott Debor, Executive Vice President of Micron Technology and Products, said: “Micron’s 176-layer NAND has set a new benchmark for the industry. Its layer count is nearly 40% higher than that of our competitors. It is comparable to the company’s CMOS array. Combining the architecture, this technology can maintain Micron’s leading position in the cost of the industry.” 176-layer NAND represents Micron’s fifth-generation 3D NAND and second-generation replacement gate architecture. Currently, this product is the most technologically advanced NAND node on the market.
Industry insiders said that Micron’s new NAND flash memory compared with the company’s previous generation of large-capacity 3D NAND, 176-layer NAND will increase the read latency and write latency by more than 35%, thereby greatly improving application performance. NAND's compact design is 30% smaller than the best-in-class competitors in die size, making it ideal for small-size solutions.
Sumit Sadana, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer of Micron, said: “Micron’s 176-layer NAND has brought breakthrough product innovations to our customers. We are deploying this technology in our broad product portfolio to enable any application that uses NAND. Place brings value, targeting growth opportunities in 5G, AI, cloud computing, and smart edge." Micron’s 176-layer NAND has a universal design and unparalleled density, and is an important part of each department in the toolbox of technical experts. These departments Including mobile storage, autonomous systems, in-vehicle infotainment, and client and data center solid state drives.
In addition to innovative technologies, Micron's 176-layer NAND provides improved service quality, which is a key design standard for data center SSDs, which can accelerate data-intensive environments and workloads such as data lakes, artificial intelligence engines, and big data analysis. For 5G smartphones, enhanced QoS can start faster and switch across multiple applications, thereby creating a more seamless and responsive mobile experience, and realizing true multitasking and full utilization of 5G low-latency networks.
Micron's fifth-generation 3D NAND also has the industry-leading maximum data transfer rate on the open NAND flash memory interface bus, 1600 Mbit/s per second, an increase of 33%. 4 Improved ONFI speed can speed up system startup and application performance. In automotive applications, this speed will provide a near-instant response time for the vehicle system immediately after the engine is started, thereby enhancing the user experience.
It is reported that Micron is currently working with industry developers to quickly integrate new products into solutions. In order to simplify firmware development, Micron's 176-layer NAND provides a single-pass programming algorithm, which makes integration easier and speeds time to market.
Why is it possible to mass produce 176-layer 3D NAND flash memory so quickly?
As Moore's Law slows down, Micron's innovation in 3D NAND is critical to ensuring that the industry can keep up with the growing data demand. To achieve this milestone, Micron Technology uniquely combines its stacked replacement gate architecture, novel charge trap technology and CuA 5 technology under CMOS array. Micron’s 3D NAND expert team has made rapid progress using the company’s proprietary CuA technology, which constructs a multi-layer stack on the logic of the chip-packaging more memory in a more compact space and greatly reducing the size of 176 The chip size of layer NAND generates more gigabytes per wafer.
At the same time, Micron has improved the scalability and performance of future NAND by changing its NAND cell technology from a traditional floating gate to a charge trap technology. This charge trap technology is combined with Micron's replacement gate architecture, which uses highly conductive metal word lines instead of silicon layers to achieve unparalleled 3D NAND performance. Micron's adoption of this technology will also enable the company to achieve aggressive, industry-leading cost reductions.
With these advanced technologies, Micron's durability has been improved, which is particularly beneficial in write-intensive use cases-from aerospace black boxes to video surveillance recording. In mobile storage, the 176-layer NAND replacement gate architecture can increase the performance of mixed workloads by 15% to support ultra-fast edge computing, enhanced AI reasoning and graphics-rich real-time multiplayer games.
It is understood that Micron’s 176-layer three-layer unit 3D NAND has been mass-produced in Micron’s Singapore factory and has been shipped to customers through its Crucial consumer SSD product line. The company will launch other new technologies based on this technology during the 2021 calendar period. product.
How about Samsung and SK Hynix's 176-layer research?
Today, Samsung’s mass production is that the sixth-generation NAND flash memory has 128 layers, and the seventh-generation flash memory will reach 176 layers, which is Samsung’s 176-layer flash memory. The seventh-generation NAND flash memory uses a "dual stack" technology, which is a kind of The through hole can be divided into two parts to allow current to flow through the circuit. The increase in the number of stacked layers will also bring technological progress, which is also a major technical difficulty at present.
It is understood that in June 2020, Samsung announced that it will invest about 9 trillion won to build a new NAND flash memory chip production facility on Line 2 of the Pyeongtaek factory in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, to expand the production line of NAND flash memory. It is expected that the facility will be It will be put into operation in the second half of 2021. However, Samsung has not announced mass production of seventh-generation NAND flash memory chips.
Although slightly behind Micron Technology in advanced technology, Samsung is the leader in the flash memory field. According to relevant statistics, in the NAND flash memory market, Samsung accounted for 35.9% of the global market with a sales of 16.517 billion US dollars in 2019, and this market share is undoubtedly far ahead.
Because 176-layer is the industry trend in the next few years, the giants in the flash memory field are all taking action, of course, including SK Hynix. SK Hynix still stays in the 128-layer flash memory field, but it is said to be 4D NAND flash memory, aimed at enterprise level Data center and professional market. SK Hynix only revealed that they are developing next-generation 4D NAND flash memory with a 176-layer stack, but there is no definite news about when it will be mass-produced.
For Kioxia and Intel, although they also want to seize the 176-layer or above market, Intel is still focusing on the development of 144-layer 3D NAND flash memory. There is no news about 176-layer, and Kioxia is still focusing on 128-layer research and development. Including China's Yangtze River Storage is also continuing to make efforts in the 128-layer area.
Why these flash memory chip companies are focusing on the development of high-level flash memory chips? This involves the storage density, cost, and capacity requirements of the chip. In the future, 176-layer chips may occupy a certain share of the large-capacity market.