Wednesday, November 20th 2024
SK hynix Starts Mass Production of World's First 321-High NAND
SK hynix Inc. announced today that it has started mass production of the world's first triple level cell-based 321-high 4D NAND Flash with 1 Tb capacity. Following its previous record as the industry's first provider of the world's highest 238-layer NAND since June last year, SK hynix has become the world's first supplier of the NAND with more than 300 layers by finding a technological breakthrough for stacking. The company plans to provide the 321-high products to customers from the first half of next year.
Stacking more than 300 layers came into reality as the company successfully adopted the "3 plugs" process technology. Known for its excellent production efficiency, the process electrically connects three plugs through an optimized follow-up process after three times of plug processes are finished. For the process, SK hynix developed a low-stress material, while introducing the technology that automatically corrects alignments among the plugs.
With the adoption of the same development platform from the 238-high NAND on the 321-high product, the company could also improve the productivity by 59%, compared with the previous generation, by minimizing any impacts from a process switch.
The latest product comes with an improvement of 12% in data transfer speed and 13% in reading performance, compared with the previous generation. It also enhances data reading power efficiency by more than 10%.
SK hynix plans to steadily expand the use of the 321-high products by providing them to the nascent AI applications, which require low power and high performance.
Jungdal Choi, Head of NAND Development at SK hynix, said that the latest development brings the company a step closer to the leadership of the AI storage market represented by SSD for AI data centers and on-device AI. "SK hynix is on track to advancing to the Full Stack AI Memory Provider by adding a perfect portfolio in the ultra-high performance NAND space on top of the DRAM business led by HBM."
Stacking more than 300 layers came into reality as the company successfully adopted the "3 plugs" process technology. Known for its excellent production efficiency, the process electrically connects three plugs through an optimized follow-up process after three times of plug processes are finished. For the process, SK hynix developed a low-stress material, while introducing the technology that automatically corrects alignments among the plugs.
The latest product comes with an improvement of 12% in data transfer speed and 13% in reading performance, compared with the previous generation. It also enhances data reading power efficiency by more than 10%.
SK hynix plans to steadily expand the use of the 321-high products by providing them to the nascent AI applications, which require low power and high performance.
Jungdal Choi, Head of NAND Development at SK hynix, said that the latest development brings the company a step closer to the leadership of the AI storage market represented by SSD for AI data centers and on-device AI. "SK hynix is on track to advancing to the Full Stack AI Memory Provider by adding a perfect portfolio in the ultra-high performance NAND space on top of the DRAM business led by HBM."
20 Comments on SK hynix Starts Mass Production of World's First 321-High NAND
But that's almost irrelevant now, compared to needs for AI servers. But instead of "trickling down" of tech made for corporate the lines are completely separate now. All we will get are higher prices.
On the other hand, the stagnation in consumer NAND/SSD sector, is just embarassing. The size/speed leaps of HDD technology was much bigger, and in shorter amount of time, than SSDs for a decade (since the first massive appearance). Almost every week the another announcement, from one NAND maker, or other. But the capacity is till like back in 2018, or even earlier.
And that's excluding the fact, that the reliability goes down proportionally the cell capacity.
So people need the cheaper, more reliable storage with more capacity.