Samsung today announced it has begun mass producing the industry’s first three-dimensional (3D) V-NAND flash memory using 32 vertically stacked cell layers, which is its second generation V-NAND offering.
Samsung’s 32-layer 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND) requires a higher level of design technology to stack the cell arrays than the previous generation 24-layer V-NAND, yet delivers much greater production efficiency because Samsung can use essentially the same equipment it used for production of the first generation V-NAND.
In addition, Samsung has just launched a line-up of SSDs based on its 2nd generation V-NAND flash memory with 128 gigabyte (GB), 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacity drives. Previous V-NAND SSDs were targeted for enterprise usage, the second generation V-NAND SSDs are targeted at high-end PCs.
The new 3D V-NAND-based SSDs have approximately twice the endurance for writing data and consume 20 percent less power, compared regular (2D) MLC NAND-based drives.
Samsung claims it will introduce additional premium 3D-based SSDs later this year. Also these SSDs will be based on the now announced 2nd generation V-NAND memory with even higher reliability and higher-density in satisfying a diversity of customer needs.
