Recently, according to the Korean media "BusinessKorea", Samsung Electronics has maintained the first position in the global DRAM and NAND flash memory markets for 30 consecutive years and 20 years respectively. At the same time, major manufacturers have been tirelessly pursuing higher layers of flash memory and more advanced memory manufacturing processes for many years. The industry is worried that Samsung's dominance will be shaken in the future. Under these circumstances, will the memory market structure change in the future?
Manufacturers such as Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung have been chasing higher layers of NAND flash memory. After surpassing 100 layers, they began to move towards 200+ layers to improve performance.
Judging from last year's technical achievements, for Micron, in July 2022, Micron's world's first 232-layer NAND flash memory was officially mass-produced in the Singapore factory, while Samsung was working hard on 176-layer NAND flash memory at that time. In December of the same year, Micron successfully shipped 232-layer NAND client SSDs to PC OEM customers, which are suitable for mainstream notebooks and desktops.
For SK Hynix, in August 2022, SK Hynix successfully developed 238-layer NAND flash memory, which is currently the highest number of layers in the world. Put into mass production in the first half of the year.
As for Samsung, as the industry continues to report new developments in flash memory technology, Samsung can't help being anxious. Faced with various noises, Samsung has stated that it will release 236-layer NAND flash memory products in 2022. To further increase research and development efforts, Samsung also plans to open a new research and development center, which will be responsible for developing more advanced NAND flash memory products.
Finally in November 2022, Samsung announced the mass production of 236-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips, which is the 8th generation V-NAND of 1Tb (128GB) three-bit cell (TLC) with the highest storage density among Samsung products. Samsung's ninth-generation V-NAND is currently under development, and plans to mass-produce the ninth-generation NAND flash memory from 2024.
Samsung has predicted that by 2030, the company will create V-NAND with more than 1,000 stacked layers. And to achieve this, Samsung is transitioning from the current TLC architecture to a quad-level cell (QLC) architecture to increase density and enable more layers.
As for Western Digital/Kioxia, Western Digital said in May last year that it will launch more than 200-layer (BiCS+) flash memory products with Kioxia in the future, and will successively launch more than 300-layer, 400-layer and more than 500-layer flash memory products before 2032 technology. However, there is currently no latest news from Western Digital and Kioxia.
Reposted from: International Electronic Commerce, automatically translated by Google
