Developments in 3D TLC Industrial NAND Flash
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3D TLC NAND has been in the mainstream market for several years and has quickly established itself as the NAND of choice for consumer, client and enterprise solutions.
But what has been happening behind the scenes in the industrial market? Why did 3D TLC take longer to get into this market? The simple answer is that industrial vendors needed to fully understand the performance characteristics of 3D TLC and to extensively test and measure to ensure is compatibility for high-performance industrial applications.
Fast forward to 2020 and 3D TLC Industrial NAND is established as a viable cost-effective alternative to the more traditional 2D NAND such as SLC, MLC and pSLC (all of which are still in plentiful supply).
NAND manufacturers are still pushing the layer boundaries of 3D TLC with some manufacturing 128 layers as standard, but SK Hynix has a roadmap for 800 layer TLC touted to be circa 2030. So great news for a lower cost/bit and in turn for the consumer. But for industrial NAND there needs to be a more cautious approach. It’s simply not a case of dropping any old 3D TLC and dropping it an industrial application. It will likely fail.
Currently, 64/96 layer TLC is the standard for industrial 3D TLC NAND but will we see anything higher than 96 layer soon? Yes, probably next year but at present, there is little appetite for industrial 1xx (112 layer/128 layer) NAND given how long it has taken to get 64/96 layer into the market.
Innodisk, a specialist in industrial memory and storage, currently use 64/96 layer 3D NAND as it has been extensively tested and pushed to the limits to ensure performance is stable and consistent. 3D TLC promised higher capacities, lower power consumption, faster performance and better endurance and to an extent is has delivered on all fronts. For industrial applications, it will never beat the speed and endurance of SLC but against MLC and pSLC the price and performance are hard to ignore which make it an attractive, cost-effective solution. Capacities are good with up to 2TB for SATA based storage with 4TB in development for PCIe Gen4 x4 coupled with a whole host of benefits such as controlled BOM, AES 256-bit encryption, supply longevity plus some more customisable features such as power and firmware settings.
To view the Innodisk 3D TLC SATA product range, 3TE7 click here and the PCIe, 3TG6-P range here