Samsung begins mass production of fifth generation V-NAND memory

Samsung Electronics has just announced the beginning of the mass production stage of the fifth-generation V-NAND memory chips. The new chips are the industry's first ones to use the "Toggle DDR 4.0" interface which enables them to provide a solid performance increase over the previous generation.

According to Samsung, the new 256 Gb V-NAND reaches 1.4 Gbps when transferring data between storage and memory, which translates to a solid 40 percent increase over the fourth-generation V-NAND. The energy efficiency of the fifth-generation V-NAND chips is comparable to the previous generation thanks to the reduction of the operating voltage from 1.8 V to 1.2 V. The data write speed is also the fastest to date at 500 microseconds — a 30 percent improvement.

In addition to the above, it is also worth mentioning that the manufacturing productivity of the fifth-generation V-NAND memory has increased by over 30 percent thanks to the enhancements in the atomic layer deposition process.

The fifth-generation 256 Gb parts that are already in production will soon be followed by 1 Tb and quad-level cell (QLC) offerings, revealed Kye Hyun Kyung, executive vice president of Flash Product and Technology at Samsung Electronics. These new V-NAND chips will be used for a wide range of applications, including premium smartphones, but also in supercomputing projects and enterprise servers.