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2025.01.22
Samsung has launched the industry's first mass production of the ninth generation QLC V-NAND for the AI era.
Seoul, South Korea – September 12, 2024 – Samsung Electronics, a global leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass production of its 1Tb (terabit) quad-level cell (QLC) ninth-generation vertical NAND (V-NAND).
Following the mass production ofthe ninth-generation triple-level cell (TLC) V-NAND in April this year, Samsung has once again taken the lead by launching QLC V-NAND, further consolidating its leadership position in the high-capacity, high-performance NAND flash memory market.
SungHoi Hur, Executive Vice President and Head of Flash Product and Technology at Samsung Electronics, stated: "The successful mass production of QLC ninth-generation V-NAND just four months after the successful mass production of the TLC version enables us to provide a complete set of advanced SSD solutions to meet the demands of the AI era. As the enterprise SSD market rapidly grows driven by AI application demands, we will continue to strengthen our market position in this field through QLC and TLC ninth-generation V-NAND."
Samsung plans to expand the application of the ninth-generation QLC V-NAND, starting with branded consumer products and gradually extending to mobile universal flash storage (UFS), personal computers (PC), and server solid-state drives (SSD), providing solutions for customers including cloud service providers.
Samsung's ninth-generation QLC V-NAND integrates multiple innovative technologies, bringing technological breakthroughs:
- Samsung's proud through-silicon via etching technology achieves the highest number of layers in the industry for the dual-stacked structure. Leveraging the technical experience accumulated from the ninth-generation TLC V-NAND, the area of the cell region and peripheral circuits has been optimized, resulting in an approximately 86% increase in bit density compared to the previous generation QLC V-NAND.
- The "preset mold" technology ensures uniformity and optimization of inter-layer and intra-layer cell characteristics by adjusting the spacing of the word lines (WL) of the cell. As the number of V-NAND layers increases, these characteristics become particularly important. The use of "preset mold" technology has improved data retention performance by approximately 20% compared to previous versions, thereby enhancing product reliability.
- Predictive programming technology reduces unnecessary operations by predicting and controlling cell state changes. With this technology, the write performance of Samsung's ninth-generation QLC V-NAND has doubled, and data input/output speed has increased by 60%.
- Low-power design technology significantly reduces power consumption by lowering the NAND cell drive voltage and only sensing the necessary bit lines (BL). The power consumption for reading and writing data has been reduced by approximately 30% and 50%, respectively.