Earlier this month, Samsung announced that it was now mass producing the industry's first 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory, offering a 128 gigabit (Gb) density in a single chip. Speaking during a keynote address at the Flash Memory Summit 2013, Samsung VP E.S. Jung compared the 3D V-NAND and its resulting "disruptive innovation" to "a Digital Big Bang in the global IT industry," and introduced the first SSD based on its 3D V-NAND technology.
V-NAND breaks away from the floating gate-based planar structure that has been used in conventional memory over the past 40 years by utilizing the Samsung's proprietary vertical cell structure based on 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology, and vertical interconnect process technology to link the 3D cell array. By applying both of these technologies, it's able to provide over twice the scaling of 20nm-class planar NAND flash.
Aimed at enterprise servers and data centers, the Samsung V-NAND SSD comes in 960 GB and 480 GB capacities. The former offers a 20 percent increase in sequential and random write speeds via 64 dies of MLC 3D V-NAND flash each offering 128 Gb of storage with a 6 Gb/s SATA IC. The V-NAND also offers 35,000 program erase cycles.