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Toshiba readies its own 3D NAND to take on Samsung, Micron

Toshiba announced its new 3D NAND is sampling today. Is Samsung finally about to have some competition?
By Joel Hruska
Toshiba-Feature
Toshiba announced today that it has begun sampling its own 3D NAND memory. For the past nine months, Samsung has owned the 3D NAND, or V-NAND business. But that could change by the end of this year as Toshiba's own designs start hitting the market. Toshiba is trying to leapfrog Samsung's maximum density with 48-layer memory, as opposed to the Korean manufacturer's current 32-layer designs.

Let's talk layers

Samsung calls its approach to 3D NAND "Charge Trap Flash," while Toshiba has dubbed its implementation "Bit Cost Scalable." While there are likely some differences, the two approaches are said to be broadly similar. Typical NAND has historically been manufactured using a floating gate. Both designs trap electrons, but in Charge Trap Flash, the trapping layer is an insulator rather than a conductive floating gate. This has become particularly important as process nodes have shrunk -- NAND floating gates leak more at smaller process geometries.

Toshiba's 48-layer design should give it even better densities than the 32-layer designs that Samsung is currently shipping, particularly since Samsung's current chips are 86Gbit compared to 128Gbit for the upcoming Toshiba products. We don't know what process node Toshiba is using for this technology -- the company has been quick to talk up its 2D planar products, which will push ahead at what Tosh calls the 15nm node this year, but there's no word on the 3D products. Presumably Toshiba, like Samsung, is using an older process node -- possibly its 32nm technology.

Toshiba BICsToshiba's Bit Cost Scalable

Right now, Toshiba has a theoretical 16-layer advantage over its rival, but that could narrow by the time this NAND is actually shipping. Today's announcement is that Toshiba is sampling hardware, but it won't hit its full stride until the company's Fab 2 comes online in the first half of 2016. By that point, Micron should have its own 3D solution shipping as well.

The end result of this shift for consumers will be a further reduction in the cost of SSDs. Mechanical hard drives are still expected to remain less expensive than solid state drives over the long run. But the advent of 3D manufacturing could push flash prices below 20 cents per GB -- well within an order of magnitude compared with hard drive costs.

The other advantage of 3D NAND, at least so far, is improved reliability and endurance. Testing SSD reliability is a finicky process -- there are many ways that the devices can fail -- but one of the downsides to lower process nodes has been decreased longevity and lower program/erase cycle counts. Samsung's 850 Pro had the highest P/E count and total guaranteed write capacity of any consumer drive we've seen in years, thanks to its 40nm process node. Hopefully we'll see similar results from Toshiba and Micron and Intel when their 3D NAND eventually ships.

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3D NAND V-NAND 14nm Samsung 15nm

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