March 23, 2021 
Dr. Jeongdong ChoeKIOXIA’s new XL-FLASH for ultra-low latency NAND application
We’ve just found a new XL-FLASH product with 96L BiCS4 NAND cell architecture from KIOXIA. According to KIOXIA, XL-FLASH is extremely low-latency, high-performance Flash Memory that is based on 3D BiCS NAND architecture and technology. Like Samsung Z-NAND (Z-SSD), it was designed to address the performance gap between existing DRAM and NAND Flash, which means XL-FLASH is classified as Storage Class Memory (SCM). Samsung already introduced some Z-SSD products, 983 ZET and SZ985 for ultra-low latency application, built on a modified 3D V-NAND design with single level cell (SLC) mode.
Key features of KIOXIA XL-FLASH include 128 Gb die, SLC mode, 16 plane die design, compatible FLASH protocol and 4KB page size to fit into SCM application in the memory hierarchy. The DapuStor H3900 we’ve been analyzing is one of enterprise SSD (eSSD) products, Haishen3-XL, which is based around KIOXIA XL-FLASH technology. The H3900 SSD is used for SCM such as data cache and acceleration, in-memory database, AI and Big Data, similar to where Intel Optane storage and Samsung Z-SSD are today...
Dr. Jeongdong Choe, Senior Technical Fellow
Dr. Jeongdong Choe is a Senior Technical Fellow at TechInsights. He has nearly 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, R&D and reverse engineering on DRAM, NAND/NOR FLASH, SRAM/Logic and emerging memory. He worked for SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics for over 20 years. He joined TechInsights and has been focusing on technology analysis on semiconductor process, device and architecture. He has written many articles on memory technology including DRAM technology trend, 2D and 3D NAND process/device integration details, and Emerging memory such as STT-MRAM, XPoint, ReRAM and FeRAM design and architecture. He quarterly produces and updates a widely distributed memory roadmaps on DRAM, NAND and Emerging memory.
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