The race to develop new and better flash storage chips is apparently coming to a head. On the heels of Monday"s announcement of Resistive RAM from Crossbar, Samsung has announced it has started mass producing the first 3D Vertical NAND flash storage chips.
Samsung"s press release states that the first 3D V-NAND chip has 128 GB of storage. The 3D cell structure of the chip is supposed to be better than the conventional way of putting the cells on a 2D plane. Samsung says this will allow for 3D V-NAND chips to have twice the write speed compared to ordinary flash storage, and up to 10 times the reliability.
The company claims that its proprietary technology will allow for as many as 24 cell layers to be stacked vertically, which will allow for even denser flash storage products that can be used inside SSDs for laptops and tablets along with storage inside smartphones.
Samsung has not announced when the first products with 3D V-NAND chips will be released but since the chips are now entering mass production, it"s more than possible that 2014 could mark the debut of the chips inside Samsung"s Galaxy smartphones and tablets and its ATIV Windows products.
Source: Samsung on Business Wire | Image via Samsung