Kioxia ships with West Number 218 story 3D NANDFlash

     To demonstrate continued innovation in advanced flash memory technology, Kaixia Corporation and Western Digital Corporation released details of their latest 3D flash technology, which is currently in production. Using advanced miniaturization and wafer bonding technologies, the 3D flash is not only cost-attractive, but also offers superior capacity, performance and reliability, making it ideal to meet the exponential data growth needs of many markets.

     "The new 3D Flash demonstrates our strong partnership with Kioxia and our joint innovation leadership in the 3D NAND space." "Through a shared R&D roadmap and continued R&D investment, we are able to advance the development of this fundamental technology to produce high performance, capital efficient products," said Alper Ilkbahar, senior Vice President of Technology and Strategy at Western Digital.

     By introducing a variety of unique processes and architectures that allow continuous horizontal miniaturization, Kioxia and Western Digital reduce costs. This balance between vertical and horizontal miniaturization yields more capacity in a smaller chip, reducing the number of layers while optimizing costs. The two companies also developed the groundbreaking CBA(CMOS Direct Bonding to Array) technology, where CMOS wafers and memory unit array wafers are manufactured separately in an optimized state and then bonded together to provide higher gigabyte (GB) density and fast NAND I/O speeds.

     "We successfully launched the eighth generation BiCS FLASH™ with the highest density 1 in the industry through a unique engineering partnership," said Masaki Momodomi, Kaixia's chief Technology Officer. "I am pleased to see that Kaixia has begun shipping samples to some of its customers. With CBA technology and Micro innovation, we further drive our product portfolio of 3D flash technology in a range of data-centric applications, including smartphones, iot devices and data centers."

     The 218-layer 3D flash uses innovative horizontal miniaturization technology for 4-plane 1Tb three-layer storage unit (TLC) and four-layer storage unit (QLC), bringing more than 50% bit density improvement. Its high-speed NAND I/O speed exceeds 3.2GB/s, a 60% improvement over the previous generation, while improving write performance and read latency by more than 20%, which will accelerate users' overall performance and availability.