YMTC X3-9070 marks the fastest 3D NAND flash memory from China

Just in time for the Flash Memory Summit 2022, the company from China presented the YMTC X3-9070, the fastest 3D NAND flash memory produced in-house in the country. This is made possible, among other things, by the specially developed Xtacking 3.0 technology.

YMTC X3-9070 presented at FMS 2022

These days, all eyes are on Santa Clara, California, where manufacturers presented their memory innovations at the Flash Memory Summit 2022. In addition to the new Phison X1 SSD platform, for example, SK Hynix showed a 238-layer NAND, while subsidiary Solidigm unveiled its debut product, the P41 Plus.

Chinese manufacturer YMTC was also on hand with a premiere, unveiling the new YMTC X3-9070 3D NAND flash memory, which is said to be the successor to the X2-9060. It is said to increase significantly in terms of speed and is also significantly smaller with the same capacity.

YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technologies Company), which was only founded in 2016 in Wuhan, China, is financed by the government, among others, and marks the largest flash memory manufacturers in the country.

The new X3-9070 is a TLC NAND with 3 bits per memory cell (Triple Level Cell). The new model is said to provide a whopping 1 TBit per die, which marks a doubling compared to its predecessor. However, the manufacturer did not provide any information about the number of layers.

The Chinese manufacturer does not participate in the layer race, which SK Hynix and Micron have recently taken to the extreme with 238 and 232 memory layers in the Micron v6, and surprisingly did not reveal any details about the number of layers. However, this should be larger than the predecessor in the form of the X2-9060, which offered 128 layers.

New Xtacking 3.0 architecture

There are details about the YMTC X3-9070 on other levels, though. As the name suggests, the model switches to the more modern Xtacking 3.0 architecture – an in-house development of the company.

Here, I/O chip logic and NAND memory are manufactured separately on a separate wafer and only later combined on a memory chip. However, nothing has been revealed about the details of the third generation of this architecture.

However, performance is said to increase significantly thanks to the new 6-plane design and 2,400 MT/s (ONFI 5.0) interface. Compared to the predecessor, a performance increase of about 50 percent is mentioned. The performance is, at least on paper, on par with SK Hynix and Micron.

At the same time, the power consumption of the 3D NAND from YMTC is supposed to drop significantly. The new flash memory is supposed to consume around 25% less energy. That sounds promising at least.

On the other hand, it is unclear how far the development of the YMTC X3-9070 3D NAND flash memory has already progressed. The company did not mention any details about market maturity in the presentation.