Kioxia and SanDisk arrived at the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara with a 10th-generation QLC 3D flash technology that stacks 332 layers, packs more than 37 gigabits into each square millimetre of silicon, and runs its interface at 4.8 gigabits per second, a first for QLC NAND.
The density figure is the headline number. It works out to a 60 percent gain over the companies' 8th-generation QLC, achieved by adding layers and tightening the floorplan rather than shrinking the cell itself. Both firms call it the industry's highest bit density for QLC flash, and the figure is their own, not an audited ranking.
"QLC technology enables the efficient storage of rapidly expanding data volumes, helping deliver greater performance and scalability for AI systems," said Hideshi Miyajima, chief technology officer at Kioxia. Translated: four bits per cell is the cheapest NAND there is, and AI clusters are finally buying bulk flash in volumes that make cheap the deciding word.
On the SanDisk side, the claim runs broader. "By redefining the performance and efficiency envelope of QLC NAND, our 10th-generation QLC 3D flash memory delivers simultaneous gains in density, bandwidth, and energy efficiency," said Alper Ilkbahar, the company's chief technology officer. The engineering underneath is concrete enough. CBA construction fabricates the CMOS logic and the memory array on separate wafers before bonding them, the interface pairs Toggle DDR6.0 with a separate command address protocol, and a power-isolated termination scheme trims I/O power on reads.
What the announcement does not carry is just as instructive. There is no die capacity, no endurance rating, and no volume production date, only a commitment from Kioxia to accelerate development toward commercialization. QLC lives or dies on endurance and on the controller work that hides it, and neither company is showing that hand yet.
A record staked out jointly still has to become two separate product lines. Kioxia and SanDisk co-develop flash and share fab output while selling against each other in the same accounts, so the density crown they claim together feeds a contest between them as much as a contest with Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix, all of whom are pushing QLC at the same bulk AI storage tier.
Bootnote: the BiCS line traces back to the Toshiba and SanDisk joint development program at Yokkaichi, a partnership that outlived Toshiba's memory spin-out into Kioxia and more than one change of SanDisk ownership. The two have now been building flash together, and competing for the same buyers, for over two decades.
Leave a Reply