Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd (YMTC) has revealed its X2-6070 and X2-9060 128-layer 3D NAND chips. The firm's previous offerings maxed out at 64 layers, so the X2-6070 and X2-9060 are a pretty significant milestone for YMTC and its efforts in the non-volatile flash memory space.
QLC (quad-level cell) chips have grown very popular as they've opened the doors for SSD makers to offer high-density drives at very relatively low prices. YMTC has joined the foray of QLC NAND producers to provide another option for SSD vendors.
YMTC's latest chips are based on its proprietary Xtacking 2.0 architecture. The technology manufactures the interconnects on one wafer and the NAND stacks on another. Subsequently, YMTC employs an optical-based system to align the gazillion of holes with extreme precision and then fuse the wafers together. The greatest benefit of Xtacking is that YMTC can salvage the bottom parts and just slap a higher-stacked part on the top. Currently, YMTC is the only NAND manufacturer in the world to use this technology.
The X2-6070 is a 128-layer 1.33Tb QLC 3D NAND chip. The X2-6070 has passed verification with various of YMTC's controller partners, meaning that it's ready for prime time. The X2-6070 isn't the only chip in YMTC's 128-layer portfolio though. The company also introduced the X2-9060, which is a 128-layer 512Gb TLC (triple-level cell) chip. YMTC claims that both chips can deliver a read and write performance up to 1.6 Gbps by applying a VCCQ voltage of of 1.2V.
YMTC's X2-6070 should start appearing in future consumer SSDs very soon and eventually, the chip's usage will extended to enterprise SSDs as well.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.