YMTC to Detail 3D NAND Chips

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. (YMTC) will unveil next week its latest 3D NAND chips. The talk by chief executive Simon Yang at the Flash Memory Summit here will mark the first public discussion of an effort from China to produce leading-edge memory chips.

YTMC will describe what it calls Xtacking as an approach to 3D NAND that delivers a “speed-up to DRAM DDR4 while delivering industry-leading bit density, marking a quantum leap for the NAND market.” Xtacking “enables parallel processing of the NAND array and periphery … a modular approach [that will] shorten the time-to-market for new generations of 3D NAND and open the possibility for customized NAND flash products,” according to a press statement.

The company, described as the pride of China, has long been seen as one of the country’s most likely candidates to deliver a commercially viable mainstream memory chip. It was founded in 2016 with a whopping $24 billion in funding, leveraging the 12-inch fabs of China’s XMC in Wuhan.

YMTC announced a 32-layer 3D NAND chip last year and said that it would ship this year a 48-layer version. In February, a Wall Street analyst said that YMTC’s yields on its 32-layer NAND chips were still very low, suggesting that a 48-layer part could still be many months from general availability.

If YMTC’s target remains the same, it will be one or two steps behind larger rivals. Intel, Micron, Samsung, and Toshiba/WD have announced or are shipping 96-layer, 4-bit-per-cell devices. Samsung said that its chips have DDR4-like speeds at 1.4 Gbits/second.

The YMTC news comes at a time of heightened trade tensions between the U.S. and China, where semiconductors have been a particular flash point.

Industry trade groups have long lobbied the U.S. government to help set a level playing field in China. The China government is investing heavily in chips and requiring foreign firms to transfer their technology in exchange for market access, they claim. However, they protested the Trump administration’s recent tariffs as an ineffective and even harmful approach.

YMTC said that its Xtacking chips will be used in UFS as well as client and enterprise solid-state drives for use in smartphones, PCs, and data centers. The company claims that it has “help from customers, industry partners, and standard bodies [to enable] a whole new chapter in high-performance NAND solutions.”

Ironically, Samsung, which was the first company to announce commercial 3D NAND chips at the Flash Memory Summit, is not participating in the event this year. The gap leaves YMTC an opening to be the talk of the show at which all the other major flash vendors are participating.