Today Micron Technology, Inc. announced that it is shipping, in bulk, the world’s first 176-Layer 3D NAND. 176-Layer would be the densest on the market allowing for potentially more capacity in a smaller footprint ideal for mobile, automotive, client devices as well as the data center. The new NAND will go through both Micron and Crucial SSD product lines.
Today Micron Technology, Inc. announced that it is shipping, in bulk, the world’s first 176-Layer 3D NAND. 176-Layer would be the densest on the market allowing for potentially more capacity in a smaller footprint ideal for mobile, automotive, client devices as well as the data center. The new NAND will go through both Micron and Crucial SSD product lines.
128-Layer NAND hasn’t even been around a year, and now Micron is passing right over it. The new Micron 176-Layer 3D NAND is the company’s fifth generation of NAND and second-generation replacement-gate architecture. The company states that users can expect to see up to a 35% reduction in read and write latency. The use of a 30% smaller die size (roughly the same size of the 64-Layer die) also lends itself well to areas where small form factors are a must, including mobile storage, autonomous systems, in-vehicle infotainment, and client and data center solid-state drives (SSDs).
The new NAND is said to offer an improved QoS, which can help to accelerate data-intensive environments and workloads such as data lakes, artificial intelligence (AI) engines and big data analytics. The new QoS will play a part in performance for 5G smartphones. Newer devices will most likely focus on multitasking and users will want to see apps launch faster and be able to switch between them at a quicker rate. The 176-Layer NAND will help users take more advantage of the low-latency network offered by 5G. The company also notes that the new NAND has a maximum data transfer rate at 1,600 megatransfers per second (MT/s) on the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) bus. This is beneficial for most applications (faster performance and bootup times) but particularly for the automotive applications.
We’ve spoken a bit about performance but now let’s look at endurance. Micron claims an increase in endurance for the 176-Layer NAND through the replacement-gate architecture. Higher endurance will play a bigger factor in edge and automotive use cases, that are typically write-intensive.
Availability
The new Micron 176-Layer 3D NAND is current in volume production and shipping to customers. While it will be released in the Crucial consumer brand, no specific products have been name as of yet.
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