Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd (YMTC) announced that its 128-layer 1.33Tb QLC 3D NAND flash memory chip, X2-6070, has passed sample verification on a SSD platform in cooperation with "multiple" controller partners.

The company claims that its first QLC based 128-layer 3D NAND has achieved the highest bit density, highest I/O speed and highest capacity so far among all released flash memory parts in the industry. YMTC also introduced the 128-layer 512Gb TLC (3 bit/cell) chip, X2-9060, in order to meet diversified application requirements.

"As a new entrant in the flash memory industry, YMTC has reached to new heights by launching the 1.33 Tb QLC product," said Grace Gong, YMTC Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales. “We are able to achieve these results today because of the incredible synergy created through seamless collaboration with our global industry partners, as well as remarkable contributions from our employees. With the launch of Xtacking 2.0, YMTC is now capable of building a new business ecosystem where our partners can play to their strengths and we can achieve mutually beneficial results.”

Leveraging the in-house developed Xtacking chip architecture, YMTC says it has optimized the design and manufacturing processes of CMOS circuits and memory arrays. Xtacking was also used for the company's high-end 64-layer flash memory chips, which entered volume production last year.

In its 128-layer line of products, Xtacking has been upgraded to version 2.0. In terms of read/write performance, 1.6Gbps can be enabled on both X2-6070 and X2-9060 by using 1.2V Vccq, which is the highest I/O speed in the industry.

The the X2-6070 supports an 1.6 Gb/s high-speed I/O performance and a 1.33Tb capacity. “We are confident that this product will be able to meet a broad range of market needs and provide even greater value to our customers. This QLC product will first be applied to consumer-grade solid-state drives and will eventually be extended into enterprise-class servers and data centers in order to meet the diverse data storage needs of the 5G and AI era,” said Ms. Gong.

Compared with TLC, QLC offers a larger capacity, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency for read-intensive applications. Each X2-6070 QLC chip has 128 layers of array stacks and contains more than 366 billion effective charge-trap memory cells. As a single memory cell contains 4-bit data, each chip provides a total of 1.33 Tb storage capacity.

YMTC is a unit of Chinese semiconductor giant Tsinghua Unigroup, and it is part of Chinese company's key push to reduce reliance on the foreign semiconductor industry.