The company behind X-NAND flash memory claims to have doubled the speed of its storage for its second generation of chips, as reported by Blocks and Files (opens in new tab), by enabling data writes in parallel. This way, X-NAND can deliver SLC levels of performance from QLC flash, which is cheaper and comes in larger capacities.
Neo Semiconductor’s X-NAND architecture can be applied to all generations of flash memory and involves dividing each plane of the 3D matrix into four to 16 sub-planes, each of which can be accessed in parallel, using page buffers to optimize speed. Gen 2 X-NAND (opens in new tab) (PDF) takes this idea and compresses it down, using one plane to write to another, whereas before, it would have used three planes to write to a fourth. See our feature here for a fuller write-up of how the technology works.
The simple explanation is that it speeds things up, and a Gen 2 3D X-NAND chip can be written to at 3,200 MBps instead of the 1,600 MBps of the previous generation, with the whole thing operating 20 times faster than conventional NAND flash. There are also latency improvements, but details on this haven’t been released.
The Gen 2 tech picked up a Best in Show award (opens in new tab) at this year’s Flash Memory Summit, held in Santa Clara, California, from August 2 to 4. According to Neo, the new tech is compatible with current manufacturing techniques with no increase in manufacturing cost or die size.
Speaking after receiving the award, Neo Semiconductor’s founder and CEO, Andy Hsu, said: “This award recognizes our efforts to introduce to the NAND market a truly innovative technology with a wide array of capabilities that address the growing performance bottlenecks in IT systems and consumers products. X-NAND Gen-2, which doubles throughput over X-NAND Gen1, enables the customer to achieve SLC-like performance with larger capacity and lower cost QLC memory. X-NAND Gen2 incorporates zero-impact architectural and design changes that do not increase manufacturing costs while offering extraordinary throughput and latency improvements.”
At the time of writing, however, it wasn’t clear which storage companies were actually using X-NAND.