Dr. Jeongdong Choe is a Senior Technical Fellow at TechInsights with nearly 30 years’ experience in semiconductor process integration for DRAM, (V)NAND, SRAM and logic devices. He regularly provides blog content to TechInsights Memory subscribers.
October 8, 2020
Samsung finally released their V6 V-NAND with 128L (136T) in which total number of gates per vertical NAND string is 136 (136T so called). Comparing with Samsung’s V5 92L V-NAND, 36 total stacked gates increased. Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD products use their new 3D NAND generation, 128L. Historically, Samsung adopted MLC NAND for Pro SSD series, for example, 970 Pro SSD with MLC (64L), while Evo and Evo+ maintained TLC (64L and 92L). However, 980 Pro moved to TLC (128L).
The 256Gb die floor plan (Figure1) shows a four-plane-die arranged in a row, which is unique for 3D NAND die design. 136 gates including 5 dummy WLs and 3 selectors stacked for NAND strings and vertical channel (VC) holes are integrated by a single VC etching process, which means they keep 1-Tier (deck) structure with a very high aspect ratio (HAR) plasma etching process different from KIOXIA/WDC, SK Hynix and Micron/Intel’s 2 Tier process. Samsung keeps a SEG process for GSL channel area, and W CSL as well.
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