Samsung announces upcoming 236-layer V-NAND 3D memory

In addition to Micron and SK Hynix announcing 200+ layer NAND, Samsung also announced that it is preparing to start mass production of its 8th generation 236-layer V-NAND 3D memory, bringing higher performance and density to solid-state storage devices.

Samsung was years ahead of its competitors with 24-layer V-NAND flash memory in 2013, and it took quite some time for other companies to catch up. But since then, the Korean giant has become more cautious, as building hundreds of layers of NAND has become increasingly difficult. This year, Micron and SK Hynix beat Samsung to the punch with 232-layer and 238-layer 3D TLC NAND devices. But Samsung is not standing still and is preparing to start mass production of 236-layer 3D NAND memory (which will, of course, be named V-NAND), according to Business Korea.

Samsung produced the first samples of V-NAND memory with more than 200 layers in mid-2021, so it should now have enough technical experience to start mass production of such devices. Unfortunately, it is difficult to judge the capacity of Samsung's upcoming 8th generation V-NAND chips at this time. Nevertheless, we are sure that one of the company's next-generation NAND memory goals will be faster interface speeds and other performance characteristics to achieve the next generation of best-in-class SSDs.

In order to build competitive solid-state storage solutions for upcoming desktops and notebooks with PCIe Gen5 interfaces and smartphones supporting UFS 3.1 and 4.0 interfaces, Samsung needs NAND devices with high-speed interfaces. Today Samsung's V7-NAND already has an interface speed of up to 2.0 GT/s, but we expect the company to further increase the interface speed of its V8-NAND.

Another expectation of Samsung's 8th-generation V-NAND is to increase cell block size and reduce read latency, thereby optimizing the performance of large-capacity 3D NAND devices.

While increasing the number of NAND layers is sometimes considered an easy way to scale flash memory, this is not the case. Making NAND layers thinner (and therefore NAND cells smaller) requires new materials to reliably store charge. In addition, because etching hundreds of layers is challenging (and may not be economically feasible), 3D NAND manufacturers need to adopt techniques such as string stacking to build 3D NAND with hundreds of layers. Samsung has not yet adopted string stacking in its 176-layer V7-NAND, but it remains to be seen whether the technology will be used in the 236-layer V8-NAND.