Samsung is a major storage chip manufacturer, and today the company announced that it has started mass production of its latest NAND chips – QLC 9th generation V-NAND with 1 Terabit (125 GB) storage.
In April, Samsung became the first company to mass-produce 9th-generation V-NAND with triple-level cell (TLC) technology. Now, they’re upgrading that to a quad-level cell (QLC) solution, enabling 4-bit storage per cell and thus a physical chip with higher storage density.
This resulted in twice the data write speed and reduced power consumption for reading and writing data by 30% and 50% respectively.
SungHoi Hur, executive vice president and head of Flash Products and Technology, said the mass production comes just in time for Samsung to meet the need for advanced SSD solutions in the AI era.
One of the technological advancements that enabled QLC V-NAND to happen was Channel Hole Etching. Samsung achieved a higher layer count with a dual-stack structure, with cell area and peripheral circuits being optimized, improving density by 86% compared to the previous generation.
Samsung adopted Designed Mold technology, which enabled uniformity and optimization of cell characteristics between and within layers. As a result, data retention performance improved by 20%, leading to enhanced product reliability.
There are also improvements in power consumption when reading and writing data, and the new solution has doubled write performance through a technology that minimizes unnecessary actions on the chip.
QLC V-NAND chips are commonly used in SSDs. This solution will later be extended to PCs, server SSDs for cloud services and Universal Flash Storage, most commonly used in smartphones.