NAND Flash Maker Kioxia Says It Will Offer 1,000-Layer Flash By 2027

The world’s NAND flash makers have been embroiled in a battle to reach 1,000 layers of flash first. This race will theoretically give the winner the opportunity to be first to market with an ultra-high-capacity SSD that goes far beyond the existing maximum of 8TB for a consumer drive. It’s been unclear when NAND flash manufacturers would be able to achieve this watershed moment in the development of storage technology, though. Now, flash maker Kioxia says it should have something ready by 2027.

Kioxia is a Japanese memory manufacturer that used to go by the name of Toshiba, and it is known for being the company that invented flash memory in 1987. It’s also previously worked with Western Digital, and the two companies are embroiled in merger talks that never seem to resolve. Regardless, the company presented at a recent memory industry gathering where it laid out its plans, which include 1,000-layer NAND flash by 2027, according to the Japanese site PC Watch. The site notes that if this is achieved, it’s roughly three times what is possible currently—which is why we’re a bit skeptical about the timeline.

The company’s 3D-stacked memory is called BiCS, which stands for “batch processing technology.”
Credit: Kioxia

As Hothardware points out, industry heavyweight Samsung currently uses just 176 layers on its flagship SSD, the 990 Pro. Samsung rival SK Hynix has also talked about increasing density lately, too. Last year, it demonstrated the first SSD to go beyond 300 layers, but it will likely take a few years to come to fruition. SK Hynix also just recently moved beyond 176 to 238 layers and will eventually move to 321 layers—possibly as early as 2025. Micron is also currently at 232 layers. We still have several generations of NAND flash to go before we’re even close to 1,000 layers.

PC Watch notes that to achieve this anticipated density level, NAND manufacturers like Kioxia will likely switch to a denser flash using more bits per cell. In today’s drives, the most-used type of NAND is TLC for triple-level cell, or three bits per cell. QLC, or quad-level cell drives, have four bits per cell. But the more bits you add to each cell, the more difficult the engineering becomes due to how close the bits are to each other. In this bold new frontier of high-capacity SSDS, we might begin to see more QLC drives, and even PLC, or penta-level cell with five bits per cell. These drives would not perform as well as TLC but would offer much higher capacities.