American semiconductor giant Micron Technology said that it has started shipping world's first 176-layer 3D NAND flash memory which is touted to dramatically improve the application performance across a range of storage use cases spanning data center, intelligent edge and mobile devices.
The company said that 176-layer triple-level cell 3D NAND is in volume production in its Singapore fab and now shipping to customers, including through its crucial consumer SSD product lines. The company will introduce additional new products based on this technology during calendar 2021.
The company claimed that compared with the previous generation of high-volume 3D NAND, 176-layer NAND improves both read latency and write latency by more than 35%.
“Micron's 176-layer NAND sets a new bar for the industry, with a layer count that is almost 40% higher than our nearest competitor's,” said Scott DeBoer, executive vice president of technology and products at Micron.
With new NAND, the company is looking to target a broad array of sectors, including mobile storage, autonomous systems, in-vehicle infotainment, and client and data center solid-state drives (SSDs).
The company said that its new NAND solution offers data transfer rate at 1,600 mega transfers per second (MT/s) on the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) bus, a 33% improvement.
With the slowing of Moore's Law, Micron said innovation in 3D NAND is critical to ensuring that the industry can keep pace with growing data requirements.
