Kioxia BiCS 8 218-Layer 3D NAND Flash Achieves Highest Density in Industry

Kioxia has announced its BiCS 8 3D NAND flash memory, featuring 218 stacked layers. The company claims it achieves the highest density among 2xx-layer NAND flash devices in the industry.

CBA technology and Toggle DDR 6.0 interface

The BiCS 8 uses CBA technology, which bonds the CMOS directly to the memory array. It supports a Toggle DDR 6.0 interface with a peak bandwidth of 4.8 GB/s per channel. The 1Tb TLC die reaches a density of 18.3 Gb/mm². The BGA154 package measures 11.5×13.5 mm. Interface speed is 3.6 Gbps, with an actual data transfer rate of 3.2 Gbps. Read latency is 40 μs, and programming throughput is 205 MB/s.

Kioxia says BiCS 8 improves interface speed by 80% and actual data transfer rate by 60% compared to BiCS 6. Programming bandwidth is up 15%, write performance is up 20%, read latency is reduced by over 10%, and energy efficiency is improved by 30%. The company also outlined future plans: BiCS 9 will reuse 218 layers with an improved CMOS, and BiCS 10 will move to 332 layers.

Kioxia has not confirmed pricing or availability for BiCS 8 products. The company's memory business unit head, Atsushi Inoue, noted that increasing layer count is just one method to boost capacity and density, and that Kioxia is not fixated solely on adding layers.