(iTers News) - Underlying XMC’s investment project to build 3D NAND flash memory fabrication facility is its successful tape-out of the test chip. Under the partnership with Spansion, XMC has successfully tested and verified 32-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips in May 2015 with 40nm class technology.  .

XMC’s 3D NAND flash memory chips are based on its technology partner Spansion’s proprietary mirror-bit structure. Like Samsung Electronics’ charge trap 3D V-NAND flash memory chip, the mirror-bit structure is known to store electrons in a non-conductive charge trap layer, but is a lot tougher to shrink down further, making it challenging to pack as many transistors as possible into a given silicon space

Unlike planar 2D NAND flash memory chips that etch control gates, channels and floating gates on a flat structure, 3D NNAD flash memory chips a towering stack of dozens of layers either of charge trap gates, or floating gates, control gates and channels that stack one over one in a cylindrical shape.

Samsung, Toshiba, and SK Hynix are using charge trap technology to store electrons in their 3D NAND flash memory chips. Intel still sticks by conventional floating gate technology which writes and reads out data. The conductive floating gate is surrounded by planar layers of non-conductive materials.
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The advantage over the 2D NAND flash memory chip is longer life time and higher storage density, as the charge trap gates are less susceptible than the floating gate to the endless repeating d data writing and reading out sequences, which plague the lifespan of NAND flash chips.  .

The advantage will help speed up the adoption of 3D NAND flash memory chips into data center SSD, or solid state drive market. SSDs, a concentration of NAND flash memory chips and memory controllers, promised to replace HDDs in data servers in high volume, but to no avail mainly due to higher costs and shorter lifetime.

3D NAND flash memory chips give an edge over HDDs.

Spansion Inc., a subsidiary of  Cypress Semiconductor, licensed its mirrorbit-based 3D NAND flash memory chips to XMC in February 2015.

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