Samsung begins mass production of new 3D V-NAND flash memory

About a week ago, Toshiba and SanDisk announced they would begin mass production of 256-Gigabit 3D V-NAND flash memory chips using 48 layers of 3-bit MLC arrays next year. Now, Samsung has just announced that it has already begun mass production of their own such chip for use in solid state drives.

According to Young-Hyun Jun, President of the Memory Business at Samsung Electronics, the introduction of this 3rd generation V-NAND flash memory allows the company to "provide the best advanced memory solutions, with even higher efficiency based on improved performance, power utilization and manufacturing productivity, thereby accelerating growth of the high-performance and the high-density SSD markets." 

When compared to conventional 128 Gb NAND chips, the new 256 Gb ones allow Samsung to easily double the capacity of its existing SSD lineups, also promising to double the performance and to offer 50 percent better power efficiency. The best news for Samsung's customers is that these new chips are also cheaper to produce, offering "approximately 40 per cent more productivity over its 32-layer predecessor."