TLC flash memory performance catches up with mechanical hard disk

TLC flash memory performance catches up with mechanical hard disk

TLC flash memory performance catches up with mechanical hard disk

News on May 8th, after NAND flash memory entered the 3D era, the way to increase capacity mainly depends on the number of stacking layers.

In 2022, several major original manufacturers have increased the number of layers to more than 232 layers, and the next goal is to exceed 300 layers. And to continue to improve performance, Western Digital and Kioxia announced relevant information.

At the VLSI Integrated Circuit Conference in 2023, they will publish the latest research papers, introducing 8-plane 3D flash memory and flash memory with stacking layers that can exceed 300 layers.

Compared with the current 4-plane 3D flash memory, the 8-plane structure can increase parallelism.

The 1Tb 3D TLC flash memory they developed has 210 active layers, and the IO interface speed has reached 3.2GT/s, which is comparable to the 218-layer stack launched in March. 1Tb 3D TLC flash is very similar.

This structure significantly improves the performance of TLC flash memory.

The read delay is reduced from 56us for 128-layer stack flash memory to 40us, and the speed is increased to 205MB/s, which can almost compete with the current mechanical hard disk.

The latter usually has a speed of 200 To around 250MB/s.

Does this speed still sound low? In fact, this number refers to the program programming speed of TLC flash memory, that is, the original writing speed. The speed of 205MB/s is very high.

You must know that the original speed of many TLC flash memories may not even have 100MB/s, and QLC flash memory is even worse. low.

Of course, after this kind of flash memory is used in SSD hard disk, with the support of multi-channel and DRAM cache, SLC cache and other technologies, there is no problem with the speed exceeding 10GB/s.

Even after the cache is exhausted, the performance will only be higher than the current level. Less, don’t worry.

In addition to high-performance TLC flash memory, Western Digital Kioxia is still developing 300-layer or even 400-layer high-level flash memory, but this depends on semiconductor equipment manufacturers to come up with more powerful etching machines with extremely high aspect ratios.

Japan’s Dongdian Corporation Some progress has been made in this regard.