Samsung starts mass production of 5th-gen V-NAND flash memory

Samsung has been a leading memory manufacturer for years and today the company announced that it's starting production of its next-generation V-NAND memory chips. This is the fifth iteration of the technology and the key feature here is the adoption of "Toggle DDR 4.0" NAND interface.

The latter allows for 40% faster transfer speeds between storage and RAM compared to its predecessor reaching a peak of 1.4Gbps. But along with the better performance, the new memory delivers better power efficiency as well - 1.8 volts down to 1.2 volts.

The 5th-gen V-NAND chips are built similarly to the previous ones and instead of incorporating 64 layers, it comes with 90 layers of 3D charge trap flash (CTF) cells. They are stacked in a pyramid-like structure with microscopic holes in the middle. These holes serve as channels and are just few hundred nanometers wide containing over 85 billion CTF cells each storing up to three bits of data.

This has lead to a significant improvement in write speed - around 30% faster than the predecessor. The response time to read signals is also down to 50μs. The new high-performance 256GB chips will probably find their way to a number of upcoming Samsung devices including high-end smartphones.

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