A world's first product of three-dimensional vertical NAND Flash memory and beyond

In this work, we present a 3D 128Gb 2bit/cell vertical-NAND (V-NAND) Flash product. The use of barrier-engineered materials and gate all-around structure in the 3D V-NAND cell exhibits advantages over 1xnm planar NAND, such as small Vth shift due to small cell coupling and narrow natural Vth distribution. Also, a negative counter-pulse scheme realizes a tightly programmed cell distribution. In order to reduce the effect of a large WL coupling, a glitch-canceling discharge scheme and a pre-offset control scheme is implemented. Furthermore, an external high-voltage supply scheme along with the proper protection scheme for a high-voltage failure is used to achieve low power consumption. The chip accomplishes 50MB/s write throughput with 3K endurance for typical embedded applications. Also, extended endurance of 35K is achieved with 36MB/s of write throughput for data center and enterprise SSD applications. And 2nd generation of 3D V-NAND opens up a whole new world at SSD endurance, density and battery life for portables.