Micron and Intel Announce Availability of 3D NAND Technology From Joint Venture

Micron Technology and Intel announced availability of their jointly developed 3D NAND flash technology Thursday, calling it the “world’s highest density flash memory.” The 3D NAND technology stacks layers of data storage cells vertically to create storage devices with three times higher capacity than competing NAND technologies, the companies said, resulting in more storage in a smaller space, cost savings, low power usage and high performance. Applications include laptops, cellular phones, tablets and mobile devices, they said. Brian Shirley, vice president-memory technology at Micron, said “3D NAND technology has the potential to create fundamental market shifts” as planar NAND flash memory nears its practical scaling limits. Intel and Micron chose to use a floating gate cell, a universally utilized design refined through years of high-volume planar flash manufacturing, they said. 3D NAND technology stacks flash cells vertically in 32 layers to achieve 256 Gb multilevel cell and 384 Gb triple-level cell die that fit within a standard package, they said. The capacities enable gum stick-sized solid-state drives (SSDs) with more than 3.5 TB of storage and standard 2.5-inch SSDs with greater than 10 TB.