Samsung mass producing 3D vertical NAND flash chips

Samsung has announced that it will begin mass producing 3D “vertical NAND” (V-NAND) flash chips, to get around the current scaling limit for existing NAND flash technology: instead of using a traditional flat structure, Samsung is now stacking components on the chip vertically – up to 24 cell layers high – to enable higher density NAND flash memory products without having to continue planar (flat) scaling.

Moving to V-NAND has several advantages. The new chips are 2 to 10 times more reliable and offer 2x the write performance compared to existing 10nm flash memory. Remember how processors started getting more cores instead of amping up the frequency on a single core once the gigahertz limit was reached? Well, it’s pretty much the same effect here, as a multi-level structure allows for better performance even though it’s nigh on impossible to reduce the architecture size any further.

These V-NAND chips are expected to power anything from consumer SSDs to embedded flash storage (in mobile devices) in the near future.