Samsung Talks 1 Petabyte SSDs: Thousands of Layers, Packaging Innovations
As the world’s largest supplier of 3D NAND in terms of both revenue and bit shipments, Samsung regularly adopts cutting-edge production nodes to increase bit density and capacity in solid state drives. At the China Flash Memory Market Summit, the company said it could increase the capacity of a single He SSD to 1 petabyte (PB, or 1,024 terabytes), which clearly won’t happen overnight. is not.
According to a report from A&S Mug, Samsung expects 3D NAND to continue both physical and logical scaling. This means that the size of NAND flash cells will shrink and the number of layers will increase, allowing each layer to store more data. Additionally, Samsung expects more advanced packaging technology for its 3D NAND ICs. At the event, the company showed that physical, logical, and packaging innovations will drive drive capacity to 1 PB within the next decade.
Samsung has long provided the industry’s highest capacity SSDs. The company was one of the first to mass-produce his 15.36 TB drive in 2016, and then in 2017 he announced his 30.72 TB product based on 3D TLC. I’m talking about very high prices from a consumer point of view), but if you need a lot of flash storage, you can take advantage of these high capacity drives. Samsung also demonstrated his 64TB SSD in 2019, and in 2021 he showed his 3D QLC NAND-based 128TB prototype SSD, but these devices have yet to enter mass production. yeah.
In fact, unlike its industry peers, Samsung has been fairly conservative in its use of 3D QLC NAND memory and is currently “researching ways to bring QLC technology mainstream” by innovating its controllers.
But Samsung says physical scaling (shrinking NAND cells and increasing the number of NAND layers) up to 1000 layers per 3D NAND device is not enough to rapidly increase the bit density of flash memory. seems to admit that It requires more bits stored per cell).
Unlike Samsung, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) has been particularly vocal about logical scaling of NAND. In 2019, Kioxia was the first of his 3D NAND makers to discuss developing PLC (Penta Level Cell) 3D NAND memory that can store 5 bits per cell (bpc). Kioxia’s team of scientists and engineers demonstrated in action his 3D HLC (Hexa Level Cell) 3D NAND memory storing 6 bpc in 2021. The company even expressed the opinion that 8bpc OLC (Octa Level Cell) 3D NAND memory is possible. .
To store 6 bits per cell, this NAND cell needs to hold 64 voltage levels, while an 8bpc OLC 3D NAND needs to hold 256 voltage states. Increasing the number of bits per cell presents multiple challenges for manufacturers.
First, we need to identify a suitable material that can store 64 or 256 voltage states and distinguish them so that they do not interfere with each other. Second, it must be possible to mass produce using such materials. Third, we need to manage the temperature of such 3D NAND, which becomes increasingly difficult as the number of bits per cell increases. Finally, we need to develop very complex ECC algorithms for 3D HLC and 3D OLC NAND memories, and such controllers require significant computing power. As a result, the cost of such controllers may offset the logical scaling advantages of 3D NAND.
Samsung will face many of these challenges on its way to a 1-petabyte SSD within the next decade, but for now, the company doesn’t have details on how it hopes to achieve this feat. is not shared.