[Hardware] Samsung Aims For Petabyte SSDs With Future 3D NAND Tech But Won’t Hit Shelves Till 2030+

[Clayboy™]

Samsung has discussed its plans to offer up to Petabytes of capacities in its SSDs with future 3D NAND tech though they may come after a decade

 

Samsung Electronics reaching for penta-level cell scaling for its 3D NAND technology over the next ten years

At this year's China Flash Memory Market Summit (CFMS2023), Samsung Electronics was in attendance, along with other prominent flash memory companies, such as Micron, Kioxa, Arm, Solidigm, Phison, and more. Samsung Electronics discussed with the audience the topic of "Re-evolution of Flash Memory and Towards a New Era." This discussion highlighted the company's capability of high-level memory capacities and the struggles with reaching such a high capacity with its 3D NAND flash memory.

 

Kyungryun Kim, VP/GM of NAND Product Planning Group at Samsung Electronics, explained that three levels of technology — physical scaling, logical scaling, and package technology — are not only evolving but are theoretically capable of reaching capacities of one petabyte (PB), or 1,024 terabytes (TB). However, the company will not achieve that goal for another ten years by today's current technological standards. Additionally, the company is looking to utilize quad-level cell technology for more memory devices and focusing on making the technology more adept.

 

While discussing the evolutionary pathways of reaching penta-level capacities, the company also displayed the PM1743 series PCIe 5.0 solid-state drive (SSD). The new PM1743 series is up to forty percent more energy efficient than previous models and has been tested to be compatible with Intel and AMD PCIe Gen 5 platforms.

 

Samsung has always been somewhat quiet in discussing its technological advances, especially 3D NAND memory. The company is continuing to find ways of bringing quad-level cell 3D NAND devices to the public with a more extensive adoption rate. Samsung feels that focusing on newer controller technology will reach those goals. Currently, the company physically scales 3D NAND devices. However, the company would need to research logical scaling to have memory device access above one thousand layers. Logical scaling would allow for ramping up the number of bits of information stored within each cell.

 

While the company has been quiet about its technology, rival Kioxia has been more transparent about its developments. The company introduced penta-level cell 3D NAND memory in 2019, which could store up to five bits per cell (5 bpc). Two years later, Kioxia pushed past the 5 bpc technology to reach 6 bpc. The company stated that they were also researching to see if they could advance as high as 8 bpc, creating an octa-level cell 3D NAND memory device. Currently, the company has yet to reach such lengths.

 

Storing multiple bits per cell presents many challenges for many 3D NAND manufacturers. Identifying materials capable of storing various voltage states while also being able to differentiate between them to prevent interference is one such hurdle that all companies are currently struggling to overcome. Additionally, they need to develop error-correction techniques to maintain data integrity as the number of bits per cell increases.

 

 

https://wccftech.com/samsung-aims-for-petabyte-ssds-with-future-3d-nand-tech-but-wont-hit-shelves-till-2030/