SEOUL, August 25 (AJP) - SK hynix said Monday it has started mass production of a 321-layer NAND flash memory chip, a development the company described as a world first in quad-level cell, or QLC, technology.
NAND flash, a type of non-volatile memory that retains data even without power, is a critical component in solid-state drives and data centers. QLC technology, which stores four bits of information in a single cell, allows for greater density but typically comes with trade-offs in speed and durability.
The South Korean chipmaker said its new 2-terabit QLC NAND doubles the capacity of its predecessor while pushing past what it called the “technological limits” of memory stacking — the process of vertically layering cells to pack more data into a smaller footprint.
To counter the performance slowdown often associated with higher-density chips, SK hynix said it expanded the number of “planes,” or independent operating groups within the chip, from four to six.
The change enables greater parallel processing, boosting data transfer speeds to twice that of its earlier QLC product. Write performance improved by as much as 56 percent, read performance by 18 percent and power efficiency during data writes by more than 23 percent, the company said.
The new chip will first be introduced in PC solid-state drives before being applied to smartphones and large-scale data centers. SK hynix also plans to use its proprietary packaging technology, which stacks 32 NAND chips at once, to produce ultra-high-capacity enterprise SSDs for artificial intelligence servers.
“With the explosive growth of AI demand and the high-performance requirements of the data center market, we will achieve a greater leap forward as a full-stack AI memory provider,” said Jeong Woo-pyo, executive vice president and head of NAND development at SK hynix.
The company said it expects the chip to undergo customer verification before being deployed in AI data centers in the first half of next year.
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