Kioxia claims to have 1,000-layer NAND flash by 2027

Japanese manufacturer Kioxia has revealed that it plans to have 1,000-layer NAND flash memory in production by the year 2027 – which is more than five times more than we currently see, so it’s advisable to remain skeptical about the claim.

This is a race that already exists between large corporations, theoretically giving the winner an opportunity to make an SSD with a capacity exceeding 8TB available on the consumer drive market.

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As we mentioned above, it’s important to establish the difference between plans and what is currently being produced. We’re already in the second half of 2024, and Samsung’s SSD 990 Pro – the manufacturer’s most powerful in the industry – has 176 layers. Kioxia wants to have five times that in two and a half years.

SK Hynix is ​​following the same path, showing the first SSD with more than 300 layers in 2023. However, its mass production should only happen in 2025. Currently, it and Micron are already working on models with 232 layers – revealing that we will still have a few generations before reaching 1,000 layers.

Difficulties that Kioxia will face

When it comes to lower densities in NAND flash, what Kioxia will have to consider is the use of more bits per cell. In current SSDs, the most commonly used are TLC (three bits per cell) and QLC (four bits per cell). The more of these are added, the more the engineering team will have a harder time designing the hardware.

With this, the industry is expected to establish QLC formats as a new standard and PLC (five bits per cell) as lower performance drives, but which will offer much greater capacity.

Kioxia will achieve positive results in this regard by 2027, and it is a reality that all major manufacturers will have to make progress to remain in the market. The question is whether they will be able to evolve to the point of surpassing PLC and bringing even lower densities to their 1,000-layer NAND flash SSDs in that time.

Fonte: ExtremeTech