Samsung have announced today they have begun mass-producing an improved version of NAND flash memory, known as 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND), that's said to overcome the scaling limits with traditional NAND. The company revamped their Charge Trap Flash architecture to use three-dimensional layers, which can be stacked atop one another for larger, higher density storage.
With V-NAND, Samsung claims they've achieved between two and ten times the reliability of traditional NAND memory, but also twice the write performance when compared to 10nm-class floating gate NAND memory. The first storage chips using this technology will be available in 16 GB capacities, although as up to 24 layers can be stacked, Samsung has the foundations to develop single 128 GB chips.
This news comes hot off the heels of yesterday's announcement from Crossbar detailing Resistive RAM (RRAM), which is a significantly improved storage technology that should allow for up to 1 TB of storage on a postage-stamp sized chip. Crossbar's chips are meant to be considerably faster, more energy efficient and theoretically more reliable than Samsung's V-NAND, however RRAM is nowhere near ready for production while V-NAND actually is after 10 years of research.
As V-NAND can provide, theoretically, up to 128 GB on a single, 3D stacked but dense chip, we could be seeing smartphones, flash storage and solid state drives with the technology incorporated for larger capacities. V-NAND is currently being mass-produced, so expect to see products utilizing it on the shelves soon.