Toshiba, SanDisk Piloting 3D NAND That Doubles Previous Capacity

Lucas123 writes: Under a joint development agreement, Toshiba and SanDisk have begun pilot production of a new 48-layer 256Gb NAND flash chip in a brand new fab in Mie prefecture, Japan. The new X3 chips, which double capacity from 16GB to 32GB over the previous product, are made with triple-level cell (TLC) flash compared with Toshiba's last multi-level cell (MLC) chip, which stored two-bits per transistor. The chips are expected to begin shipping in products next year. The companies plan to use the new memory in a wide number of products, including consumer SSDs, smartphones, tablets, memory cards, and enterprise SSDs for data centers, the companies said.