SK Hynix starts mass production of 321-High NAND

SK Hynix Inc., the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker, announced on Thursday the mass production of its 321-layer 1-terabit (Tb) triple-level cell (TLC) 4D NAND flash memory.

Following its previous record as the industry’s first provider of the world’s highest 238-layer NAND since June last year, SK Hynix has become the world’s first supplier of NAND with more than 300 layers by finding a technological breakthrough for stacking.

The company plans to provide the 321-high products to customers from the first half of next year.

The company adopted the Three Plugs process technology. Known for an excellent production efficiency, the process electrically connects three plugs through an optimized follow-up process after three times of plug processes are finished.

For the process, SK Hynix developed a low-stress material, while introducing the technology that automatically corrects alignments among the plugs.

With the adoption of the same development platform from the 238-high NAND on the 321-high product, the company could also improve the productivity by 59%, compared with the previous generation, by minimizing any impacts from a process switch.

The latest product comes with an improvement of 12% in data transfer speed and 13% in reading performance, compared with the previous generation. It also enhances data reading power efficiency by more than 10%.

SK Hynix plans to expand the use of the 321-high products by providing them to the nascent AI applications, which require low power and high performance.

Write to Jeong-Soo Hwang at hjs@hankyung.com