Breakthrough architectural innovations in wafer bonding and scaling technology deliver a giant leap in performance, density, and cost-effectiveness
KIOXIA Europe GmbH communicates recent developments in the cooperation between KIOXIA Corporation and Western Digital Corp. The companies, demonstrating continuous innovation, have announced details of their latest 3D flash memory technology. 3D flash memory offers exceptional capacity, performance and reliability at an attractive price point, making it ideal for meeting exponentially growing data needs in a wide range of market segments.
"The new 3D flash memory demonstrates the benefits of our strong partnership with KIOXIA and our combined leadership in innovation," said Alper Ilkbahar, Western Digital's Senior Vice President of Technology and Strategy.
"By working to a common R&D roadmap and continually investing in R&D, we have been able to produce this critical technology ahead of schedule and deliver high-performance, low-capital solutions."
KIOXIA and Western Digital reduced costs by introducing several unique processes and architectures, enabling continued advances in lateral scalability. This balance between vertical and lateral scalability produces more capacity in a smaller cube with fewer layers at an optimized cost. The companies also developed a CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology, in which each CMOS wafer and cell array wafer is fabricated separately in its optimized state and then bonded together to provide higher bit density and input speed. / fast NAND output.
“Thanks to our unique engineering partnership, we have been able to successfully launch the eighth generation of BiCS FLASHTM with the highest bit density in the industry,” said Masaki Momodomi, CTO of KIOXIA Corporation. “I am pleased that KIOXIA sample shipments for limited customers have started. Through the application of CBA technology and scalability innovations, we have advanced our portfolio of 3D flash memory technologies for use in a variety of data-centric applications, including smartphones, IoT devices, and data centers."
The 3-layer 218D flash leverages 1TB of Tri-Level Cell (TLC) and Quad-Level Cell (QLC) with four planes and features innovative side-shrink technology to increase bit density by more than 50%. Its high-speed NAND I/O at over 3,2 Gb/s, a 60% improvement over the previous generation, combined with a write performance and read latency improvement of 20%, which will speed up the overall performance and usability for users.
