Japan has ambitious plans. The competition may be afraid
Kioxia, one of the largest producers of NAND chips, shared its plans for the coming years. The Japanese want to offer 1000-layer memories.
Although there are many companies on the semiconductor media market, most of them use components from the same manufacturers. Both when talking about controllers and NAND memories. Companies like this dominate here Phison and Silicon Motion and Micron, Kioxia, Samsung and SK hynix.
The Koreans have similar plans to the Japanese
Currently, in the case of memory chips, Micron is the leader, providing 232-layer 3D TLC NAND for PCIe 5.0 x4 SSDs. However, the competition is hot on their heels, and the Japanese have ambitious plans.
As reported by the Xtech Nikkei editorial team, Hidefumi Miyajima (CTO at Kioxia) says the company will start mass production 1000-layer 3D NAND memory until 2031. This was said during a speech at Tokyo City University, where the future and challenges of the SSD industry were discussed.
Increasing the number of active layers in memory chips is now possible the best way to increase recording density. This means larger and/or cheaper semiconductor media. Currently, the leap observed in the industry occurs on average every 1.5 – 2 years and requires advanced R&D and often new materials.
Kioxia's state-of-the-art memory is the 8th generation with 218 layers, which uses the CBA architecture and was introduced in March 2023. The Japanese must therefore offer almost 5x more layers in just 7 years. It won't be an easy task, but it is clearly possible. Especially since it's South Korean Samsung is also confident of achieving 1,000-layer chips in the unspecified future.
