Toshiba and Sandisk build factory to produce 1TB 3D flash module

Toshiba and Sandisk will begin construction of a new 3D nandflash manufacturing facility in September. The first chips should roll off the assembly line in 2016 and five years later the modules with stacked memory should have a capacity of 1TB.

Toshiba announces to demolish the current Fab 2 at its Yokkaichi site, which is used for mainstream 2D ​​NAND production, to make way for a new facility to produce 3D NAND. The manufacturers previously planned to convert Fab 2 for 3D nand production and have it started this year. The new fab is being built together with Sandisk. The new factory should be ready in the summer of 2015 and the cleanroom will be prepared during the transition from 2d to 3d nand. This should be ready in 2016.

The demolition and construction would cost 700 billion yen, the equivalent of 5 billion euros, and Toshiba and Sandisk would each pay half of these costs. The new Fab should put Toshiba and Sandisk in a better competitive position compared to Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Samsung has already started production of 3D nandflash, SK Hynix wants to start at the end of this year and Micron recently converted a dram factory for nand production.

Conventional NAND memory is built from chips that consist of a single layer of transistors. In a chip package, several chips are often stacked, but these are separate chips, while with 3D-NAND several layers of transistors are integrated on a single chip. This stacking entails considerably higher storage capacities. Nandflash is used in SSDs, USB sticks and memory cards, among other things. “Five years after the start of the new factory, we want to produce 1TB products”, say a Toshiba spokeswoman told AFP news agency. It is unclear whether she refers to individual chips, the capacity of which is usually specified in bits, or to modules such as mmc. Even before the transition to 3D nand, Toshiba makes the step from 19nm to 15nm production. Mass production should start in June, claims EETimes, which should reduce costs. The 15nm production is used for 128Gb chips.