Jung-Bae Lee, President and Head of Memory Business of Samsung Electronics, the world's largest NAND memory supplier, has noted in the blog post that Samsung plans to develop its 9th Generation V-NAND memory with over 300 layers, aiming for mass production in 2024. Samsung's V-NAND uses a double-stack structure and is expected to have more active layers than its competitors' 3D NAND memory, such as SK Hynix's forthcoming 321-layer memory. The increase in layers allows Samsung to enhance storage density and performance in its future 3D NAND devices, focusing on input/output (I/O) speed. While the specific performance details of Samsung's 9th Generation V-NAND remain undisclosed, the memory is expected to be used in next-generation PCIe SSDs with the PCIe 5.0 standard.

Jung-Bae Lee has noted: "New structural and material innovations will be critical in the upcoming era of sub-10-nanometer (nm) DRAM and 1,000-layer vertical V-NAND. As such, we are developing 3D stacked structures and new materials for DRAM while increasing layer count, decreasing height, and minimizing cell interference for V-NAND." The 9th installment of V-NAND, scheduled for 2024, is utilizing 11 nm-class DRAM. Additionally, the blog post reassures the commitment to CXL Memory Modules (CMM), which will enable the composable infrastructure of next-generation systems, especially with high-capacity SSDs powered by V-NAND.

Courtesy of an SK Hynix keynote speech at the Flash Memory Summit, we now have a few more details about its upcoming 321-layer NAND Flash. PC Watch Japan who attended the industry event shared some pictures from the keynote which adds some crucial details that were missing from last week's press release. SK Hynix's officially shared performance figures tell us that we should expect up to 12 percent faster program performance, which should be the write performance and up to 13 percent improved read latency. Both of these performance metrics will obviously depend on the SSD controller the NAND is paired with, the related firmware on said controller and so forth.

PC Watch Japan also quotes a program throughput of 194 MB/s, which is 26 MB/s improvement over SK Hynix 176-layer NAND and currently the highest known program throughput of any announced NAND Flash. That said, Kioxia is expecting to hit 205 MB/s with its next generation of 300 layer NAND. SK Hynix also claims 10 percent better read power efficiency, which is really neither here nor there when it comes to modern SSDs, unless we're talking server level SSDs with a dozen of these NAND chips or more. Rather than going with two stacks of 150 plus layers each, SK Hynix went with three times 107 layer stacks, which should be compared to their current 238 layer product which has two stacks of 119 layers. This made the new NAND package easier to produce and should in the long term result in higher yields. Each NAND package is expected to deliver a memory density of 20 Gbit per square millimetre or more, which is almost twice that of its 176-layer NAND.

SK hynix Inc. showcased today the sample of the 321-layer 4D NAND, making public the progress on its development of the industry's first NAND with more than 300 layers. The company gave a presentation on the progress on the development of its 321-layer 1 Tb TLC 4D NAND Flash and displayed the samples at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2023 taking place Aug. 8-10 in Santa Clara.

SK hynix is the first in the industry to unveil the progress on the development of a NAND with more than 300 layers in detail. The company plans to raise the level of completion of the 321-layer product and start mass production from the first half of 2025. The company said its technological competitiveness accumulated from the success of the world's highest 238-layer NAND, already in mass production, paved the way for a smooth progress for the development of the 321-layer product. "With another breakthrough to address stacking limitations, SK hynix will open the era of NAND with more than 300 layers and lead the market."