Toshiba Details XL-FLASH (Low-Latency 3D SLC NAND)
takyon writes:
Toshiba has provided more details about XL-FLASH, a high-performance version of 3D 1-bit-per-cell NAND memory:
Last year at Flash Memory Summit, Toshiba announced XL-FLASH, a specialized low-latency SLC[*] 3D NAND flash memory that is their answer to Samsung's Z-NAND (and to a lesser extent, Intel's 3D XPoint). Few details were provided at the time, but this year Toshiba is ready to give out more information, including a timeline for bringing it to market: sampling starts next month, and mass production begins next year.
The first XL-FLASH parts will use a 128Gb die, divided into 16 planes to support a much higher degree of parallelism than existing capacity-oriented 3D NAND parts. The page size will be 4kB, significantly smaller than what most 3D NAND uses, but that's not a surprise given that XL-FLASH is storing just one bit per cell rather than three or four. Toshiba's press release does not disclose the erase block size, but we expect it to be similarly smaller than what's used in high-capacity NAND designs. As for performance, Toshiba says read latency will be less than 5 microseconds, compared to about 50 s for their 3D TLC.
Package size is 32 GB (2 dies), 64 GB (4 dies), or 128 GB (8 dies).
3D SLC NAND should continue to improve in the future as layer counts hit 176, 256, and beyond.
[*] SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC explainer.
Also at Guru3D.
See also: Memblaze's PBlaze5 X26: Toshiba's XL-Flash-Based Ultra-Low Latency SSD
Related: Western Digital and Samsung at the Flash Memory Summit
Samsung Shares Plans for 96-Layer TLC NAND, QLC NAND, and 2nd-Generation "Z-NAND"
Western Digital's Low Latency Flash: A Competitor to Intel's Optane (3D XPoint)?
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