Government backed Chinese NAND manufacturer, Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), will reveal more details about its Xtacking technology during Flash Memory Summit held from the 6th till the 9th of August this year. Xtacking technology should bring DDR4 RAM speeds to NAND memory.
In a press release, the company announces that its CEO, Simon Yang, will talk at the Flash Memory Summit, "where he will illustrate how the company's new technology can increase NAND I/O speed up to DRAM DDR4 while delivering industry-leading bit density, marking a quantum leap for the NAND market."
Transfer rates of DDR4 memory can range from 17 GB/s for DDR4 2133 up to 25.6GB/s for DDR4 3200. Current fast NVMe SSDs can achieve transfer rates of up to 3,500 MB/s for sequential reads, and up to 2,100 MB/s for sequential writes, which means drives with, "patent-pending", Xtacking technology need to be 5-7 times faster than current NVMe SSDs.
YMTC explains the claimed speed increase in the press release as well, as it writes, "Xtacking technology enables parallel processing of the NAND array and periphery. This modular approach to 3D NAND development and manufacturing will shorten the time-to-market for new generation of 3D NAND and open the possibility for customized NAND flash products."
The company is the first Chinese company that developed its own NAND flash memory. NAND memory is hard to produce and is considered a high-entry-barrier market. Nevertheless, last year YMTC announced 32-layer 3D NAND and later this year the company hopes to announce 48-layer 3D NAND. That's still far behind the likes of Samsung who both announced or already mass produce 96-layer 3D NAND.
It's unknown when the YMTC NAND chips will become widely available, the company has reportedly issues with the yields of the NAND chips.
While YMTC might not be a household name, it's not entirely surprising the company managed to develop its own 3D NAND, the company received $24 billion in funding and has been described as the "pride of China". YMTC is also constructing world’s largest single-floor memoryfab with a core plant area of approximately 1.1 square kilometers.
