The annual IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference covers a range of topics of interest to AnandTech. Every year the conference includes a session on non-volatile memories where most of the NAND flash memory manufacturers share technical details of their latest developments. At the conference we get more information than these companies are usually willing to share in press briefings, and the presentations are usually about technology that will be hitting the market during the coming year.

At ISSCC 2021 this week, four of the six major 3D NAND flash memory manufacturers are presenting their newest 3D NAND technology. Samsung, SK hynix and Kioxia (+Western Digital) are sharing their latest 3D TLC NAND designs and Intel is presenting their 144-layer 3D QLC NAND. Not participating this year are Micron (who announced their 176L 3D NAND late last year) and Chinese newcomer YMTC.

3D TLC (3-bit per cell) Updates

Samsung, SK hynix, and Kioxia/WD presented information about their upcoming generations of 3D TLC. Not shown here is Micron's 176L TLC, because they haven't released most of this data for their latest generation of 3D NAND.

3D TLC NAND Flash Memory
ISSCC Presentations
  Samsung SK hynix Kioxia (Toshiba)
WD
Year Presented at ISSCC 2021 2019 2021 2021 2019 2018
Layers   128 176 >170 128 96
Die Capacity 512 Gb 512 Gb 512 Gb 1 Tb 512 Gb 512 Gb
Die Size (mm2)   101.58   98 66 86
Density (Gbit/mm2) 8.5 5 10.8 10.4 7.8 5.95
IO Speed 2.0 Gb/s 1.2 Gb/s 1.6 Gb/s 2.0 Gb/s 1.066 Gb/s 533 Mb/s
Program Throughput 184 MB/s 82 MB/s 168 MB/s 160 MB/s 132 MB/s 57 MB/s
Read Latency (tR) 40 µs 45 µs 50 µs 50 µs 56 µs 58 µs
Erase Block Size         24 MB 18 MB
Planes 4? 2 4 4 4 2
CuA / PuC Yes No Yes Yes Yes No

Unsurprisingly, it looks likely that Samsung will again be in the lead for performance, with the lowest read latency and fastest write speeds. However, their bit density is still clearly lagging even though they're claiming a 70% jump with this generation. In the past, their lagging density hasn't been as much of a downside as it might appear at first glance, because Samsung has been able to avoid using string stacking and can manufacture a stack of 128 layers as a single deck while their competitors have all had to split their stack into two decks, increasing the number of fab steps required. This might be the generation that brings Samsung's inevitable adoption of string stacking, but if that's the case then their lingering density disadvantage is rather disappointing. On the other hand, if they've managed to put off that transition for one more generation and achieved this kind of density increase only using a combination of other techniques (most notably a CMOS under Array layout), then it's a very impressive advance and it would be safe to say that Samsung is years ahead of the competition when it comes to the high aspect ratio etching of the vertical channels that is the most critical fab step in scaling 3D NAND. We'll know more once Samsung discloses the actual layer count, but they're keeping that secret for now—which hints that they don't expect to have the highest layer count to brag about.

The TLC parts described by SK hynix and Kioxia/WD look fairly similar, save for the big difference that SK hynix is talking about a 512Gb die and Kioxia is talking about a 1Tb die. Both designs look to have similar performance and density, though Kioxia is touting a higher NAND interface speed. Kioxia and Western Digital have put out a press release announcing 162-layer 3D NAND, so they're a bit behind SK hynix and Micron for total layer count. That press release also mentions a 10% improvement in the horizontal density of their cell array, so Kioxia and Western Digital are probably packing the vertical channels closer together than any of their competitors.

3D QLC (4-bit per cell) Updates

The only company with updates this year on QLC is Intel.

3D QLC NAND Flash Memory
ISSCC Presentations
  Intel Samsung SK hynix Kioxia
WD
Year Presented at ISSCC 2021 2020 2020 2018 2020 2019
Layers 144 96 92 64 96 96
Die Capacity 1 Tb 1 Tb 1 Tb 1 Tb 1 Tb 1.33 Tb
Die Size (mm2) 74.0 114.6 136 182 122 158.4
Density (Gbit/mm2) 13.8 8.9 7.53 5.63 8.4 8.5
IO Speed 1.2 Gb/s 800 Mb/s 1.2 Gb/s 1.0 Gb/s 800 Mb/s 800 Mb/s
Program Throughput 40 MB/s 31.5 MB/s 18 MB/s 12 MB/s 30 MB/s 9.3 MB/s
Program Latency (tPROG) 1630 µs 2080 µs 2 ms 3 ms 2.15 ms 3380 µs
Read Latency
(tR)
Avg 85 µs 90 µs 110 µs 145 µs 170 µs 160 µs
Max 128 µs 168 µs       165 µs
Erase Block Size 48 MB 96 MB   16 MB 24 MB 24 MB
Planes 4 4 2 2 4 2

In general, Intel has been more focused on QLC NAND than any of its competitors. This 144L QLC is the first generation of 3D NAND Intel hasn't co-developed with Micron, and it is unique in several respects. Intel is taking its 3D NAND technology in different directions from the rest of the industry will have interesting ramifications for their agreement to sell the NAND flash business to SK hynix, but in the short term it seems like Intel is getting the NAND they want to be selling. With only 144 layers, Intel is almost certainly now in the last place for total layer count. Compared to 9x-layer QLC, Intel has much better performance and density—but QLC versions of the new TLC described by SK hynix and Kioxia should have comparable density. Intel has backed off from the frankly astronomical erase block size their 96L QLC used, but the 48MB block size of their new 144L QLC still seems a bit high.

CMOS Under Array From Everyone

Intel and Micron's now-dissolved joint venture was the second NAND flash manufacturer to make the switch to 3D NAND, after Samsung. The most significant innovation the Intel/Micron 3D NAND brought to the industry was the CMOS Under the Array (CuA) design. This places most of the NAND die's peripheral circuitry—page buffers, sense amplifiers, charge pumps, etc.—under the vertical stack of memory cells instead of alongside.

This change saves a big chunk of die space and allows for over 90% of the die area to be used for the memory cell array. SK hynix was next to make this switch, which they call "Periphery under Cell" (PuC). The rest of the manufacturers are now also onboard: Kioxia (then Toshiba) and Western Digital presented a 128-layer CuA design at ISSCC 2019 but their fifth generation BiCS 3D NAND ended up going into production as a 112L design without CuA. Their ISSCC presentation this year is for a "170+" layer design with CuA, and they've put out a press release confirming that their sixth generation BiCS 3D NAND will be a 162-layer design with CuA.

Aside from saving die space, a CuA/PuC style design for 3D NAND allows for a die to include more peripheral circuitry than would otherwise be cost-effective. This makes it practical to divide a die's memory array into more separate planes, each with their own copies of much of the peripheral circuitry. Most 3D NAND that has been built without a CuA layout has used just two planes per die, but now that everyone is using CuA the standard is four planes per die. This provides extra parallelism that increases the performance per die and offsets the overall SSD performance drop that usually comes from using fewer dies to reach the same total capacity.

A CuA structure is not without its challenges and downsides. When a manufacturer first switches to CuA they get a big increase in available die space for peripheral circuitry. But after that, each successive generation that adds layers means there's less die space available for managing the same number of memory cells, so peripheral circuitry still has to shrink. Putting peripheral circuitry under the memory cell array also introduces new constraints. For example, Samsung's ISSCC presentation this year mentions the challenges of constructing large capacitors for the charge pumps when they can no longer use the tall metal structures that are simple to include alongside the 3D NAND stack.

Better On-Die Parallelism: Four Planes Per Die

Dividing a NAND flash die into four planes allows for the die to handle more operations in parallel, but doesn't make it behave quite like four independent dies. There are restrictions on what can be done in parallel: for example, simultaneous writes still have to go to the same word line within each plane. But as the number of planes in a flash die grows, manufacturers have been working to loosen some of those restrictions. In previous years, manufacturers have introduced *independent* multi-plane reads, meaning simultaneous reads in different planes don't have any restrictions on the locations within each plane that are being read—a big win for random read throughput.

Now, another restriction on multi-plane operations is being relaxed: the timing of read operations in different planes doesn't need to line up. This makes it possible for one plane to perform multiple reads from SLC pages while another plane is performing a single slower read from TLC or QLC pages. This capability is called Asynchronous Independent (Multi-)Plane Read. The practical effect is that for read operations, a large 4-plane die can now match the performance of four smaller 1-plane dies. This mitigates many of the performance downsides that higher per-die capacity brings to SSDs that only have one or two dies per channel.

Kioxia and WD reported that implementing this capability required them to stop sharing charge pumps between planes, in order to avoid poorly-timed voltage and current fluctuations that would have resulted from unsynchronized read operations. Intel is also halfway to this capability with their 4-plane 144L QLC: planes are paired up into plane groups, and each plane group can perform reads without needing to align with the timing of reads in the other plane group.

 

NAND IO Speeds Outpacing SSD Controller Support

The new TLC NAND parts described at ISSCC support IO speeds ranging from 1.6 to 2.0 Gb/s for communication between the NAND flash dies and the SSD controller. The fastest NAND in SSDs currently on the market runs at 1.2-1.4Gb/s. The NAND manufacturers can benefit from vertical integration by ensuring that their own SSD controller designs used for their own SSDs will be ready to support these higher IO speeds, but other SSD vendors that rely on third-party controllers may be left behind. Phison's latest E18 8-channel controller for high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs only supports 1.2Gb/s IO speeds, and their upcoming E21T 4-channel NVMe controller supports 1.6Gb/s. Silicon Motion's 8-channel SM2264 and 4-channel SM2267 support 1.6Gb/s and 1.2Gb/s IO speeds respectively.

 

Since 8 channels running at 1.2Gb/s is already enough for a SSD to saturate a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection, these new higher IO speeds will not be of much use to high-end SSDs until PCIe 5.0 arrives. But more affordable 4-channel consumer SSD controllers will be able to use these higher speeds to move up well into PCIe 4.0 performance territory, matching or exceeding the throughput that the first PCIe 4.0 SSD controller (Phison E16, 8ch @ 800Mb/s) offered. As demonstrated by drives like the SK hynix Gold P31, an advanced 4-channel controller supporting high IO speeds on each channel can be very competitive on performance while operating with far higher power efficiency than 8-channel controllers.

Hitting these higher IO speeds requires major upgrades to the interface logic on the NAND dies, and as we've seen with other high-speed interfaces like PCI Express, increasing power consumption is a major concern. Samsung is addressing this by using dual-mode drivers and termination. When higher drive strength is needed because of more load on the bus (from more dies per channel), the'll use a PMOS transistor for pull-up, and otherwise they can use a NMOS transistor and cut the power consumption of the driver by more than half. This gives Samsung a single interface design that will work well for both small consumer SSDs and large enterprise drives with many more dies per channel. (In the past Samsung has added separate retimer dies to multi-chip packages that stack lots of NAND dies together on the same one or two channels. We're not sure if Samsung is still using this technique.)

 

String Stacking: First Triple-Deck NAND

String stacking has been viewed as something of a necessary evil for scaling up 3D NAND to higher layer counts. Only Samsung has managed to build more than 100 layers of 3D NAND at a time, and everyone else has long since switched to stacking two decks each with a more reasonable layer count. This means that eg. Micron's 176-layer 3D NAND is built as 88 layers of memory cells, then another 88 layers are constructed on top. This drives up cost compared to doing all the layers at once, and it requires careful alignment at the interface between decks. But the alternative would be to make the vertical channels much wider, so that the aspect ratio (width vs depth) would stay within the realm of what can be feasibly etched by current fab techniques.

Intel's 144L QLC design includes the surprise that they are already moving to a 3-deck stack: 48+48+48 layers rather than the 72+72 we would expect. Since their previous generation is a 48+48 layer (96L total) design, it's possible that they have changed very little about how the memory array itself is fabricated aside from repeating the same sequence of deposition, etch and fill steps a third time. Intel is taking a hit on fab throughput with this approach, but it probably helps them better control the variation in channel and cell dimensions from the top to bottom of the stack, which may be more of a concern given their focus on QLC and their unique decision to still use a floating gate memory cell rather than switching to a charge trap cell like everyone else.

To go along with this triple-deck structure, Intel has reorganized how they handle erase blocks, and now each of the three decks constitutes a separate collection of erase blocks. That means the middle third of a 144L string can now be erased without interfering with the data stored in the other two thirds of the string. Dividing blocks by decks is also how Intel was able to reduce the 96 MB block size with their 96L QLC down to a less extreme 48MB block size.

 

A Small Caveat about Academic Conferences

It's important to understand that ISSCC, where these updates are presented, is an academic conference. The presentations are not product announcements and the papers are not product spec sheets. The designs presented at ISSCC don't always match what goes into mass production. For example, Kioxia/WD in the past have presented designs for 128L and "170+" layer NAND, but their actual fifth and sixth generation BiCS NAND as mass produced are 112L and 162L designs. They also, despite mentioning it in their 2019 talk, deferred a switch to a more dense 'CMOS under Array (CuA) structure' to a later product line.  Specifications such as write performance are also often presented as best-case, and real world products end up being a notch below what is presented.

Despite the coming together of all these companies under one conference, even when the presentation does match the eventual product, what we learn from ISSCC is usually imperfect and incomplete information. The companies are inconsistent about what metrics they report, and we usually get information for only one die design per generation—a company might present their 512Gbit design even if they're planning to manufacture both 512Gbit and 256Gbit parts. In recent years several companies seem to be alternating between talking about their QLC one year and TLC the next. In spite of all of that, ISSCC presentations on 3D NAND are still a great way to gauge how the state of the art has progressed and where the industry as a whole is headed.

About half the content of these presentations is clever schemes for micromanaging voltages applied to various wires to optimize the read, program and erase processes. There are complex tradeoffs between speed, accuracy, wear and other factors. we're not going to dig into all of these details, other than to say that programming a cell to the desired voltage (and without disturbing other cells) is not a simple process, and even reading from a TLC or QLC cell is quite a bit more complicated than reading from a DRAM or SRAM cell. We're more interested in any major structural changes in the dies themselves, and the end results of all the finessing of voltages: the speeds at which a page of memory can be read or programmed.

Source Material: 68th ISSCC, Feb 13-22nd 2021

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  • PVG - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link

    Do you have any information on where do cell sizes stand, these days?
    Samsung, as an example, when they switched to layered NAND reverted to a more durable and reliable ~40nm cell size, from their previous 1Xnm class planar stuff. And I imagine other manufacturers did something similar.
    Did this still old true and they have just been resorting to stacking more layers to increase density, or have the cell sizes begun to shrink again?
  • Billy Tallis - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link

    I don't have any good numbers on that handy. Cell horizontal dimensions have probably shrunk a little bit, and the spacing between vertical channels has definitely been reduced to the point that interference between strings is one of the more significant sources of error. I'm not sure what games they've been playing with layer thickness. There probably won't be drastic shrinks to horizontal dimensions because they don't want to have to go back to using multiple patterning like they did for 15nm planar NAND.
  • PVG - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link

    Makes sense. Thank you!
  • Tomatotech - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link

    Encouraging news. It's still very impressive how fast SSD tech is advancing. High-speed low power 4-channel controllers are good news for portables and low prices, while the high-speed x8 controllers look set to saturate PCIe 5.0 before it's even properly widely used.

    SSDs still notably weak on random I/O though. Optane tried to address this but it looks almost dead in the consumer market.

    Billy, any thoughts on how SSDs will move forward with random i/o or do you think it's not worth addressing? Personally I'd happily give up 25% on max sequential for a doubling of random i/o but I appreciate that may not suit most people.
  • Billy Tallis - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link

    Random read throughput at high queue depths is growing healthily.

    TLC read latency is still creeping downward, despite the natural tendency for tR to grow as NAND strings get longer. They're putting in a lot of effort to optimize latency already.

    The only ways to drastically improve tR for NAND flash memory are to use smaller page sizes than the current standard of 16kB, or to store fewer bits per cell. Both techniques are very detrimental to $/GB, but Samsung and Kioxia have both dabbled in small page size 3D SLC as an Optane competitor. What keeps them from experiencing much success in the market is that improving tR has diminishing returns for overall system/application performance. There aren't a lot of applications that run significantly better with 500k IOPS @ 10µs random reads than with 500k IOPS @ 60µs random reads (on a larger and cheaper drive).
  • Tomatotech - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link

    Thank you for the reply. Yup high queue depth random i/o looks good. I was thinking more of low queue depths, but thank you for explaining the issues.

    One way forward could be to designate part of the drive as specially tuned for small files / small page size? A hypothetical 50GB-ish area could contain a hell of a lot of small files and wouldn't be missed on a 1TB+ drive, and would only cost a few dollars more. The advantages would be faster return to sleep, lower power consumption, and yes, marketing numbers.

    This might look like the cache debate all over again, but this would be specifically designated for small frequently used files, so not a cache, and not quite a tier / SLC holding area as already implemented in many drives. The SSD mapping would just point towards the special area for small files (and possibly move the least recently used small files to main storage if more space was required)
  • romrunning - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link

    It does seem like you're describing pseudo-SLC caching most SSDs do, but if I'm interpreting correctly, you're differentiating it as a permanent storage for small, frequently-used files versus just a cache of all frequently-used files. So basically you're talking about tiered storage, where you move the most-accessed files into the highest-speed storage storage and the rest in a lower storage category. This is a feature of a lot of SANs, but for local SSDs, you'd need OS support + hardware support to make that happen.
  • Tomatotech - Sunday, February 21, 2021 - link

    Almost right thanks. Lots of consumer SSDs do already have tiered storage, where part of the SSD is treated as SLC and the rest is TLC / QLC / PLC. (Details differ between models).

    However as Billy Tallis said, for large files there is not much scope for gain from improving latency. Suppose a 100MB file takes 0.1 second to transfer. Whether latency takes 60 ms or 20ms makes little difference.

    However for a 4KB or 128KB file, latency makes up a much bigger part of the transfer time. So having a special storage area with ultra low latency for frequently used files under say 512KB could really help with low queue (consumer use) random small file I/O. To give you an idea of the potential, SSDs can shift large files at around 4GB/sec, but for single queue small files, that falls to around 50MB/ sec.

    Small files are the kind of thing that portables wake up for - email, notifications, social media, network activity, housekeeping etc, so improving this area would get them back to sleep again faster. As well as supporting other areas like AI-related data scanning and database building.
  • Wereweeb - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link

    Yes. As SSD's diverge in capabilities, storage tiering (Like the FuzeDrive did) will become a necessity. Placing the hottest files in smaller pSLC blocks could really help with QLC reliability and average latency, not to speak of PLC.

    But in applications where peak performance isn't vital, like consumer drives, the tendency is towards driver/hardware/firmware simplification (To reduce costs). Someone will end up using QLC SSD's with ZNS to murder the budget TLC market.

    And while ZNS already adopted ways for managing distinct random reads/writes regions, I don't know how tiering could be done without specifically designing for it, and if they didn't already do it with ZNS it will be hard to change that.
  • Billy Tallis - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link

    Enmotus sells a Phison E12 QLC drive with custom firmware that presents an SLC portion and a QLC portion to the host system, rather than using drive-managed SLC caching. Their 2TB model gives you ~1.6TB usable space, the first 128GB of which are SLC. Their FuzeDrive software manages data placement, but also lets you manually pin data to either the fast or slow tier. It's a really interesting approach.

    I've had the hardware for a while, but haven't gotten around to properly testing it. The tiering software for the FuzeDrive SSD is Windows-only, which is a nuisance since a lot of my test suite is Linux based. But I did make some changes to the new Linux test suite with an eye toward being able to test the SLC and QLC portions of that drive separately.

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