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29.10.2023 09:51, Alexey Razin
Back in November last year, the Chinese company YMTC announced the start of mass production of 232-layer QLC 3D NAND memory, ahead of competitors such as Kioxia and SK hynix. Even Micron Technology, with its 232-layer TLC 3D NAND memory, is slightly behind its Chinese rival, which has long been under US sanctions. This week, evidence emerged that YMTC’s advanced memory is already being used in production SSDs.
Image source: TechInsights
The same company TechInsights, which at the end of summer obtained evidence of the presence of 7-nm HiSilicon Kirin processors in Huawei smartphones of the Mate 60 family, this past week published a report on the study of the 1 TB ZhiTai Ti600 solid-state drive released in July without much publicity. This drive uses 232-layer YMTC QLC 3D NAND memory. According to TechInsights experts, these memory chips provide the highest information storage density among all chips supplied to the market in commercial quantities, namely 19.8 Gbit/mm2.
As is known, YMTC was able to achieve progress in this area through the use of Xtacking 3.0 technology, which allows the formation of 3D NAND memory chips with so many layers. Competing companies Micron and Solidigm (Intel) are just developing 232-layer QLC 3D NAND memory, and the former already has 232-layer TLC 3D NAND in its arsenal, but it is inferior to the YMTC solution in terms of data storage density due to the use of three bits per cell instead of four.
The largest memory manufacturer Samsung Electronics abandoned the development of 236-layer QLC 3D NAND memory in the eighth generation, instead focusing on ninth-generation QLC and TLC chips. SK hynix specializes in TLC 3D NAND memory, which is also inferior to YMTC products in terms of data storage density at a particular stage. It turns out that the Chinese company managed, under the conditions of sanctions, to launch the production of advanced QLC 3D NAND memory, surpassing all rivals in terms of information storage density.
2023-10-29 06:51:00
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