Kioxia aims to launch 1,000-layer NAND flash memory in 2031 to reorganize storage-class memory business

According to Nikkei xTECH, Kioxia CTO Hideshi Miyajima said at the recent 71st Spring Academic Lecture of the Japan Society of Applied Physics that the company aims to launch in 2030~2031 1000-layer 3D NAND flash memory and reorganized the storage class memory (SCM) business.

KIOXIA and Western Digital are working together to develop NAND flash memory technology. The most advanced product of the current partners is the 218-layer stacked BICS8 3D flash memory. BICS8 flash memory can achieve an I/O rate of 3200MT/s.

In 2022, another major NAND company demonstrated a similar view at Technology Day. It is predicted that by 2030, they plan to achieve 1,000-layer stacked 3D NAND storage.

Increasing the number of stacking layers is the main way to increase the capacity of a single 3D NAND flash memory particle. However, as the number of layers increases, the difficulty of etching vertical channels in flash memory particles gradually increases as the aspect ratio increases. In addition to high difficulty and low yield, high aspect ratio etching is also a time-consuming and costly process: currently each such etching takes about 1 hour. If NAND factories want to increase production capacity, they must purchase More etching machines.

Therefore

KioXia uses a dual-stack process

in BICS8 to achieve vertical channel etching of the two NAND stacks separately. This move increases the trouble of passage between dual stacks, but overall it still reduces the difficulty. Thousand-layer stacked NAND flash memory is expected to contain more NAND stacks in the future.

In addition, Miyajima Hideshi also said that compared to competitors that operate both NAND and DRAM,

Kioxia is at a competitive disadvantage in terms of business richness, so it is necessary to cultivate storage-class memory (SCM), etc. New storage product business

. The CTO said that under the AI ​​boom, the performance gap between DRAM and NAND is widening, and SCM can fill this gap.

KioXia reorganized the previous "Memory Technology Research Laboratory" into the "Advanced Technology Research Laboratory" on April 1. Its SCM research will focus on new memories such as MRAM, FeRAM, and ReRAM, which are expected to be shipped within 2 to 3 years.

Referring to reports on this site, Kioxia previously focused on XL-FLASH flash memory solutions in the SCM field. The company launched the second generation of XL-FLASH in 2022 that supports MLC mode.

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