SK Hynix steps up chip stacking war with 238-layer 4D NAND
Ye-Rin Choi
Jun 08, 2023 (Gmt+09:00)
SK Hynix Inc., the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker after Samsung Electronics Co., has begun mass production of the industry’s highest-layered and smallest NAND chips, intensifying the race to develop chip stacking technology to cut costs and improve performance.
The South Korean chipmaker said on Thursday it began manufacturing 238-layer, 512-gigabit (Gb) four-dimensional NAND chips in large quantities last month. Product compatibility tests with a global smartphone maker are currently underway, it said.
SK Hynix is the world’s first chipmaker to commercialize the 238-layer 4D NAND after it unveiled the chip last August as the industry’s first, amid its push to sharpen its chip stacking technology.
“We have secured the world’s top-tier competitiveness in terms of costs, performance and quality for both the 238-layer and the previous generation 176-layer NAND chips. We expect these products to drive earnings improvement in the second half of the year,” the company said in a statement.
The latest NAND boasts a data transfer speed of 2.4 Gb per second, a 50% improvement over the 176-layer NAND. The chip also improves read and write latency by 20% and manufacturing efficiency by 34%, enhancing its cost competitiveness.
Once its compatibility tests are completed, SK Hynix will begin supplying the 238-layer 4D NAND to smartphone makers and expand the chip’s application across its product portfolio, including PCle 5.0 solid-state drives for PCs and high-capacity server SSDs.
PCle, short for peripheral component interconnect express, is a serial-structured high-speed input and output interface used in the main boards of digital devices.
SK Hynix said it also plans to unveil double-capacity 1 terabit (Tb), 238-layer NAND products in the near future.
“We will continue to overcome NAND technology limitations and increase our competitiveness so that we can achieve a bigger turnaround than our rivals when the market rebounds,” said Kim Jum-soo, vice president and head of SK Hynix’s 238-layer NAND development team.
COMPETITION HEATS UP
Demand for NAND memory chips used in data storage devices such as hard drives and cameras has risen in recent years.
Higher-density NAND chips will accelerate data-intensive environments and workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI) engines and big data analytics. For 5G smartphones, the enhanced capacity can enable faster launching and switching across multiple apps, creating a more responsive mobile experience and faster multitasking.
A NAND flash is a type of non-volatile memory chip that stores data even when the power is off.
Global NAND players have been engaged in a game of chicken to gain ground in the fast-growing market.
In November 2020, Micron Technology Inc. surprised the market by announcing that it developed 176-layer 3D NAND flash memory, then the world’s highest-density chip at a time when most players were focused on 128-layer NAND.
Last year, the US company began producing 232-layer NAND chips in large quantities.
Samsung said last November it began volume production of eighth-generation 1 Tb vertical NAND (V NAND) chips, which industry officials said were 236-layered.