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Western Digital’s 96 layer 3D NAND will lead to terabit memory chips http://ift.tt/2smEffS Why it matters to you Western Digital's new 3D NAND will lead to larger solid-state drives and flash-storage solutions, but they won't enter mass production until 2018. Although there is some legal scuffling ongoing between Toshiba and Western Digital, the two technology giants have co-developed a new standard of 3D NAND flash memory known as BiCS4, featuring 96 layers of vertical storage. This is a 50 percent increase in layers over the previous 64-layer BiCS3 technology and will offer a 40 percent boost in storage capacity for drives that make use of it but do not expect the full capabilities of the technology anytime soon. One way that storage manufacturers have been able to increase the size of solid-state drives (SSD) and other flash storage mediums, is through 3D NAND. By stacking information vertically, the footprint on the PCB is much reduced and enables the use of more memory chips in the same form factor. This Western Digital development is the latest incarnation of that and could lead to much larger SSDs in the future. The key word here is future though. While the earliest iterations of this BiCS4 technology will be shipped out to original equipment manufacturers and Western Digital partners in the latter half of 2017, they will only be in the 256-gigabit chip range. This technology is said to be capable of creating one terabit chips, though they are unlikely to appear for at least another year. Mass production of any of these chips won’t begin until 2018, either. BiCS4 technology is expected to see Western Digital through to 2020, during which time it will continually evolve and improve, before being replaced by its eventual successor around that time, Anandtech reports. That means that the existing 64-layer BiCS3 chips will continue to be manufactured and Western Digital suggested that this recent development will not slow down production on the older technology. It claimed that 2017 will see it and its partner, Toshiba, produce more 64-layer 3D NAND than ever before — more than any other industry supplier throughout the year. Along with praising Western Digital’s ability to stick to its roadmap for intended release dates of the new BiCS4 hardware, Western Digital’s executive vice president of memory production, Siva Sivaram, said: “BiCS4 will be available in 3-bits-per-cell and 4-bits-per-cell architectures, and it contains technology and manufacturing innovations to provide the highest 3D NAND storage capacity, performance and reliability at an attractive cost for our customers. Western Digital’s 3D NAND portfolio is designed to address the full range of end markets spanning consumer, mobile, computing and data center.” Not all is rosy at Western Digital, though. It was revealed by anonymous sources only last week that its WDLabs division was being shut down. Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC June 28, 2017 at 12:08PM
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