Samsung Mass Produces 1Tb QLC 9th-Gen V-NAND Chips

Samsung, the world's largest memory chip manufacturer, has officially announced the mass production of its 1Tb QLC (Quad-Level Cell) 9th-generation V-NAND chips. This marks a significant technological milestone as Samsung becomes the first company globally to implement this advanced technology at scale.

Following the development of the world's first TLC (Triple-Level Cell) 9th-gen V-NAND chips in April 2024, Samsung has now advanced to mass-producing QLC chips. While TLC stores three bits of data per cell, QLC increases that to four, offering higher capacity for data storage.

With this new development, Samsung continues to lead the industry in high-capacity, high-performance memory solutions. The company has introduced several key technologies to achieve this, including:

· Channel Hole Etching: This technique is used to stack mold layers and create a channel through which electrons can move, increasing storage density. The new dual-layer stacked structure offers an 86% improvement in bit density compared to previous QLC technologies.

· Mold Design: Samsung has optimized the spacing of wordlines (WLs) that control the operation of storage cells, improving reliability by increasing data retention by 20%.

· Predictive Programming: This innovation minimizes unnecessary cell operations by predicting changes in cell states, reducing power consumption by 30% during data reads and 50% during writes.

Samsung plans to utilize these QLC V-NAND flash memory chips in a wide range of products, including consumer and server SSDs, as well as UFS storage for mobile devices.

SungHoi Hur, Executive Vice President and Head of Flash Product and Technology at Samsung Electronics, said, "The successful mass production of the 9th-gen QLC V-NAND, just four months after the TLC version, allows us to provide a full range of advanced SSD solutions tailored to the AI era. With the rapid growth of enterprise SSDs and increasing demand for AI applications, we will continue to strengthen our leadership in this sector with both QLC and TLC 9th-gen V-NAND technology."