SK hynix Begins Mass Production from 176-Layer to 238-Layer 4D NAND Flash

SK hynix Inc. started mass production of its 238-layer 4D NAND flash memory, following the development in August 2022, and announced that product compatibility test with a global smartphone manufacturer is underway.

“SK hynix has developed solution products for smartphones and client SSDs which are used as PC storage devices, adopting the 238-layer NAND technology, and has moved into mass production in May,” said the company. “Given that the company secured world-class competitiveness in price, performance and quality for both 238-layer NAND and the previous generation 176-layer NAND, we expect these products to drive earnings improvement in the second half of the year.“

The 238-layer product – the smallest NAND in size – has a 34% higher manufacturing efficiency compared to the previous generation of 176-layer, resulting in improvement in cost competitiveness.

Besides, with a data-transfer speed of 2.4Gb/s, a 50% increase from the previous-gen, and approximately 20% increase in RW speeds, the company is confident that it will be able to deliver an improved performance to the smartphone and PC customers using this technology.

Once the product compatibility test with the smartphone manufacturer is completed, it will begin supplying the 238-layer NAND product for smartphones, and expand the technology across its product portfolio such as PCIe 5.0 ^(*) SSDs and high-capacity server SSDs going forward.

“We will continue to overcome NAND technology limitations and increase our competitiveness so that we can achieve a bigger turnaround than anyone else during the upcoming market rebound,” said Jumsoo Kim, head, S238 NAND.

^(*) PCIe 5.0: PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is a serial-structured high-speed I/O interface used in the main boards of digital devices, with PCIe 5.0 doubling the data rate to 32GT/s (Gigatransfer per second) from PCIe 4.0.