Quote:It seems that lately every storage semiconductor company is engaged in an all-out war and crowing about chips made with an ever-increasing number of layers. Samsung's the latest to talk up its silicon cookies. The company says it's ramping production of its 64-layer V-NAND chips now, and it expects half of its V-NAND flash production to be of that type by the end of the year. 64-layer V-NAND previously began shipping to "key IT customers" in January.

Samsung says that its chips can hit speeds of 1 Gbps, making them the "fastest among currently-available NAND flash memory." The new offerings are more frugal, too, seeing as they only require an input voltage of 2.5 V, down from the 3.3 V required by Samsung's previous-generation 48-layer chips. The company also says that the new chips offer 30% better energy efficiency and that the new V-NAND cells have 20% higher reliability. Finally, the 64-layer flash has what the Samsung calls the "industry's shortest page program time" of 500 μs, a number that the company says is four times faster than typical 10-nm planar flash and about 1.5 times faster than its own 48-layer V-NAND.

Looking to the future, Samsung believes that the industry will start competing by offering better performance and reliability for flash chips instead of focusing solely in a race to the feature size bottom. The company also states that it has the "fundamental technology" to create 1 Tb flash chips with 90 layers of cell arrays in the future. We look forward to it.