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Micron Technology Inc on Tuesday said it began shipping its most advanced NAND flash chip made up of 232 layers of memory cells that can support heavy data use from consumer appliances, cars and data centers.
A NAND flash chip is a storage chip that retains data even when a device is turned off, unlike a DRAM chip that loses data when the power is turned off.
The latest chip transfers data 50 percent faster than Micron’s previous-generation NAND chips, said Alvaro Toledo, general manager of the data center storage division.
While logic chips have become faster with smaller transistor sizes, in the last decade storage chips have increased the number of layers after overcoming challenges to achieve improvements and cost savings necessary only with the reduction in transistor size.
Toledo said 16 of these 232-layer NAND chips can be packed into a housing about one-third the size of a stamp and can hold 2 TeraBytes of data.
Mass production of the 232-layer NAND is expected to begin in late 2022, he said. (Reporting by Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by Leslie Adler)