The two companies has started installing a set of wafer fabrication equipment in the new Fab 2 facility at Toshiba's Yokkaichi wafer fabrication cluster.
Purely dedicated to produce Toshiba's 3D NAND flash memory chips dubbed as BiCS Flash, the facility will come on line sometime in the first quarter of the calendar 2016 from April to June 2016, getting ready for mass-production.
The companies also have signed definitive agreements for joint manufacturing of 3D flash memory and investment in New Fab 2.
Seiichi Mori, corporate senior vice president of Toshiba Corporation and CEO of Semiconductor & Storage Products Company, said, “The partnership of SanDisk and Toshiba has consistently pioneered advances in the memory industry through our technology leadership and commitment to innovation and excellence. We look forward to fabricating 3D flash memory, BiCS FLASH, in New Fab 2.”
“These agreements pave the way for the highly successful SanDisk-Toshiba partnership to seamlessly transition into the 3D NAND era,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief executive officer of SanDisk. “3D NAND enables new levels of density, scalability and performance across a broad set of customer applications. We look forward to our continued leadership in NAND flash technology and solutions.”
The 3D NAND flash memory chips are the most crucial building blocks to manufacture SSDs, amkign up almost 80% of SSD cost.
Compared with 2D planar NAND flash memory, the 3D chips are far faster in data read and and write speed, more durable, can pack more memory cells in a given space, and more importantly, come cheaper, allowing chip makers and SSD vendors to manufacture SSDs at lower cost. These advantages will accelerate the penetration of SSDs to rapidly displace HDDs in the fast-growing data center server market.
As data traffic is still exploding, demand for data center servers is skyrocketing. So is demand for SSDs and NAND flash memory chips.
Samsung is now leading the 3D NAND flash memory chip market. To catch up, Intel and Toshiba are building their respective 3D NAND flash memory chip fabrication facilities.