At the recently held meeting of Micron management with analysts. Questions rose a lot and some of them relating to the transition theme to new versions of the non-volatile memory. According to Micron, the company began mass production of 32-layer memory type 3D NAND. This 256-Gbit MLC and 384-Gbit TLC. Consumer products based on these chips will begin to appear this summer. This memory will produce SSD capacity up to 3.5 TB in a form factor M.2 and SSD capacity up to 10 TB in a form factor of 2.5 inches.
I must say that the cost of the first-generation 3D NAND memory companies Micron slightly higher than the cost of memory 3D V-NAND from Samsung company. This means in particular that Micron company can for a long time work at a loss. Samsung Company to enter the profitable production of memory 3D V-NAND took about one and a half years. The difference in cost because Micron flash cell utilizes a floating gate, and Samsung company - a more advanced and more compact cell with a charge trap.
Micron Company expects to begin to implement the production of the charge trap memory in the middle of this year. This will be the second generation of memory 3D NAND Micron. Mass production of improved memory is expected by the end of 2016. The company Micron expects that the cost per gigabyte of data storage on the second generation 3D NAND memory will be 30% lower. In turn, the cost of storing gigabytes of data in a 3D NAND memory of the first generation is 25% lower compared with 16 nm planar NAND-flash memory.