QLC technology is being used by Toshiba to push the bit count for data per memory cell from three to four, significantly expanding capacity. The new product achieves the industry's maximum capacity of 1.33 terabits for a single chip and was jointly developed with Western Digital Corporation.
It has realised a capacity of 2.66 terabytes in a single package by utilising a 16-chip stacked architecture. The huge volumes of data generated by mobile terminals and the like continue to increase with the spread of SNS and the progress in IoT and the demand for analysing and utilising that data in real time is expected to increase dramatically. This will require even faster HDDs and larger capacity storage and such QLC-based products, using the 96-layer process, will contribute to the solution.
Samples of the SSD and SSD controllers will be delivered to manufacturers for evaluation from the beginning of September and Toshiba expects to start mass production in 2019.
