South Korea's SK Hynix, the world's second-largest memory chip maker, said on Wednesday it has developed its most advanced NAND flash memory chip, which consists of 238 layers of memory cells, to be used in personal computer storage devices, as well as smartphones and servers. SK Hynix claims that the new 238-layer chip is the smallest NAND flash memory chip, the data transmission speed is 50% higher than that of the previous generation, and the energy consumption for reading data is reduced by 21%. In addition, the company is preparing to start mass production of the new chips in the first half of 2023.
SK hynix unveiled the product at the 2022 Global Flash Memory Summit held in California, USA on the same day. The company stated that this is the first year and seven months since the company developed 176-layer NAND in December 2020 to successfully develop the next-generation new technology. In particular, the new product has both the highest number of layers in the industry and the smallest NAND product at present, which is of great significance.
Compared with 176-layer NAND, the production efficiency of the new product is increased by 34%, the data transmission speed (2.4Gb per second) is increased by 50%, and the power consumption is reduced by 21%. SK hynix plans to supply 238-layer NAND for client solid-state drives (SSDs) first, and then gradually expand the use of products to smartphones and large-capacity server solid-state drives, and launch a 1Tb expansion version of the product next year.
Intel's NAND business was renamed Solidigm after it was acquired by SK Hynix. Together with SK Hynix, it accounted for 18% of the global NAND flash memory market, second only to Samsung's 35.3% and Kioxia's 18.9%. It is worth mentioning that the US competitor Micron Technology (MU.US) announced last week that it has begun to ship a 232-layer NAND flash memory chip.
