SK Hynix today announced the company started mass production of 16 nm MLC NAND flash. The Korean chip giant claims it already started mass production of the first generation 16 nm NAND in June. Today's announcement is about the start of mass producing the second generation of these chips.
The company calls the second generation more cost competitive due to a smaller chip size of the NAND which means more chips can be made from the same material.
For now SK Hynix will only produce 16 nm 8 GB MLC chips but the company hopes it can use the same technology to produce 16 GB versions of the same chip at the beginning of next year.
The chips use SK Hynix's Air-Gap technology which makes it possible to make smaller NAND cells while problems with interference between the cells is limited. The interference comes from the electric current required to achieve a binary zero and one state and with smaller cells the interference becomes more of an issue. The Air-Gap technology builds insulation shields with vacuum holes (air) between circuits instead of insulating substances.
The interference becomes more and more a problem and 16 nm is likely the smallest NAND cell size we'll see. The current NAND technology is dubbed as 2D NAND and manufacturers are now moving on to 3D technology where layers are stacked on each other.
SK Hynix states in its press release that it will accelerate the development of 3D NAND also also triple level cell (TLC) NAND, which means higher data density in the chip resulting in cheaper NAND.
