The 3D NAND flash memory is actually not the new technology anymore, on the contrary it has been mass-produced one year ago. Samsung, the leading company for this tech, has mass-produced self R&D 3rd -generation 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory on August that will adopt in SSDs products.

Samsung’s 3rd-Gen. V-NAND equipped with 48 layers of 3-bit multi-level-cell (MLC) arrays, having large capacity of 256-gigabit (Gb). Samsung said that the new product consumes over a 30 percent reduction in power compare, also achieves approximately 40 percent more productivity over its 32-layer predecessor. The mass production of new product and usage in the high-end computer and data center will be in the second half-year of 2015

Another South Korean memory supplier, SK Hyni, is begining mass production of a 36-layer 128Gb MLC die in the third quarter and is working toward a 48-layer TLC , that will be available in 2016.

Tightly followed after Samsung and SK Hynix, Toshiba and SanDisk jointly announced the new-generation 48-layer 3D NAND technology which have 256Gb TLC die in early August. Toshiba will be sampling that chip in September, and SanDisk has selected it as their first 3D NAND device for mass production.

The most representative transformation was Intel’s demonstration and announcement at IDF 2015. As the business giant in PC market, Intel’s action is the primary factor to make a new product to become fashionable. USB is the best precedent.

They announced at IDF 2015 that the 3D XPoint technology, co-developed with Micron, will be applying in own-brand SSDs products. Based on the Intel’s information, the new technology has a whole new architecture, providing up to 1,000 times lower latency, greater endurance than NAND and the preliminary capacity reaching 128Gb. Meanwhile, data center and business application are also the primary market.

Consequently, the 3D SSDs will be entering market in 2016 while more than one manufacturer. That also means the stable production capacity and competitive price war will attract speedily consumer attention, bringing out new headline for the sluggish memory market.

(TR/Yi-ting Wang )