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

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

Toshiba announces that it will demolish the current Fab 2 at its Yokkaichi location, which is used for the production of regular 2d-nand, to make way for a new facility to produce 3d-nand. The manufacturers had previously planned to convert Fab 2 for 3d-nand production and have it launched this year. The new fab will be 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, or 5 billion euros, and Toshiba and Sandisk would each bear half of these costs. The new Fab should put Toshiba and Sandisk in a better competitive position against Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Samsung has already started production of 3d nandflash, SK Hynix aims to start by the end of this year and Micron recently converted a dram factory for nand production.

Conventional nand memory is constructed from chips that consist of a single layer of transistors. Multiple chips are often stacked in a chip package, but these are separate chips, while in 3d-nand several layers of transistors are integrated on a single chip. This stacking entails significantly 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,” a spokeswoman for Toshiba told AFP news agency. It is unclear whether she refers to individual chips, whose capacity is usually specified in bits, or to modules such as mmc. Even before the transition to 3d-nand, Toshiba is making 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.

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