Samsung begins mass production of 1Tb QLC V-NAND | Infinium-tech

Samsung is a major manufacturer of storage chips, and today, the company announced that it has begun mass production of its latest NAND chips – QLC 9th generation V-NAND with 1-terabit storage (125GB).

In April, Samsung became the first company to mass-produce 9th generation V-NAND with TLC (triple-level cell) technology. Now they are upgrading this to a quad-level cell (QLC) solution, which will enable storage of 4 bits per cell and therefore allow for a more storage-dense physical chip.

This results in doubling of data writing speed and reducing power consumption for reading and writing data by 30% and 50%, respectively.

Sunghoi Hur, Executive Vice President and Head of Flash Product and Technology, said the mass production comes at the right time for Samsung to meet the need for advanced SSD solutions in the AI ​​era.

One of the technological breakthroughs that makes QLC V-NAND possible is channel hole etching. Samsung achieved high layer count with a double stack structure, optimizing the area of ​​cells and peripheral circuits, leading to an 86% improvement in density compared to the previous generation.

Samsung adopted design mold technology, allowing uniformity and optimization of cell characteristics across and within layers. As a result, data retention performance was improved by 20%, increasing product reliability.

Power consumption when reading and writing data has also been improved, and the new solution doubles write performance through technology that minimizes unnecessary actions on the chip.

QLC V-NAND chips are typically used in SSDs. This solution will later expand to PCs, server SSDs for cloud services, and universal flash storage, which is mostly used in smartphones.

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