Tuesday, August 4th 2026
Kioxia and Sandisk Unveil 10th-Gen 332-Layer QLC NAND with 4.8 Gb/s Interface Speeds
Kioxia Corporation, a subsidiary of Kioxia Holdings Corporation (TOKYO: 285A) and Sandisk Corporation (Nasdaq: SNDK) today unveiled their next-generation Quad-Level-Cell (QLC) 3D flash memory technology, which delivers up to 60% increase in bit density compared to their 8th-generation, surpassing 37 Gb/mm² and setting the industry benchmark for bit density, performance and power efficiency.
Leveraging the companies' revolutionary CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) technology which fabricates CMOS logic and the memory array on separate wafers before bonding them together with high-precision wafer-to-wafer alignment, the new generation improves read and write bandwidth compared to the 8th-generation 3D flash memory and becomes the industry's first QLC 3D flash memory technology to reach a 4.8 Gb/s interface.
Additional interface enhancements improve I/O data-out transfer power efficiency. These large power efficiency upgrades directly address the power and cooling challenges of modern AI and cloud infrastructure.
Chief Technology Officer at Kioxia, Hideshi Miyajima, said, "As AI continues to underpin the advancement of society, its applications are expanding from generative AI to agent-based and physical AI, while the use of data is becoming increasingly diverse and sophisticated. QLC technology enables the efficient storage of rapidly expanding data volumes, helping deliver greater performance and scalability for AI systems. Kioxia will accelerate development toward the commercialization of its 10th-generation flash memory products incorporating QLC technology."
Chief Technology Officer at Sandisk, Alper Ilkbahar, said, "As AI training, inference, and hyperscale datacenter workloads drive unprecedented growth in data generation, the storage industry faces increasing pressure to deliver greater capacity, higher performance, and improved energy efficiency. By redefining the performance and efficiency envelope of QLC NAND, our 10th-generation QLC 3D flash memory delivers simultaneous gains in density, bandwidth, and energy efficiency and establishes a new paradigm for high-capacity flash storage to provide a scalable foundation for next-generation infrastructure applications."
Key 10th-genaration QLC 3D flash memory technology highlights include:
Source:
Kioxia
Leveraging the companies' revolutionary CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) technology which fabricates CMOS logic and the memory array on separate wafers before bonding them together with high-precision wafer-to-wafer alignment, the new generation improves read and write bandwidth compared to the 8th-generation 3D flash memory and becomes the industry's first QLC 3D flash memory technology to reach a 4.8 Gb/s interface.
Chief Technology Officer at Kioxia, Hideshi Miyajima, said, "As AI continues to underpin the advancement of society, its applications are expanding from generative AI to agent-based and physical AI, while the use of data is becoming increasingly diverse and sophisticated. QLC technology enables the efficient storage of rapidly expanding data volumes, helping deliver greater performance and scalability for AI systems. Kioxia will accelerate development toward the commercialization of its 10th-generation flash memory products incorporating QLC technology."
Chief Technology Officer at Sandisk, Alper Ilkbahar, said, "As AI training, inference, and hyperscale datacenter workloads drive unprecedented growth in data generation, the storage industry faces increasing pressure to deliver greater capacity, higher performance, and improved energy efficiency. By redefining the performance and efficiency envelope of QLC NAND, our 10th-generation QLC 3D flash memory delivers simultaneous gains in density, bandwidth, and energy efficiency and establishes a new paradigm for high-capacity flash storage to provide a scalable foundation for next-generation infrastructure applications."
Key 10th-genaration QLC 3D flash memory technology highlights include:
- 332-layer architecture and optimized floorplan design deliver up to 60% increase in bit density, achieving >37 Gb/mm² compared to the 8th-generation.
- 4.8 Gb/s*3 NAND interface enabled by Toggle DDR6.0 and the Separate Command Address (SCA) protocol to unlock the full potential of fast interface.
- CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) architecture enhances density scaling, performance, and manufacturing efficiency.
- Power-Isolated Low-Tapped Termination (PI-LTT) improves I/O data-out transfer power efficiency.
24 Comments on Kioxia and Sandisk Unveil 10th-Gen 332-Layer QLC NAND with 4.8 Gb/s Interface Speeds
I hope it has improved significantly since Gen. 1 QLC came to market, but I seem to recall that QLC was only able to handle 150~300 P/E cycles.
That being said, even 1000 is pretty poor if they even reach that. I like good TLC with ram buffer way more. Shame they seem to be killing those in consumer land, slowly.That and you must remember all other things being equal, TLC can leverage these same benefits to get even more margin.
that is with 144 layer QLC... so for a cool $8K, this can be yours!
this is the graphic that I remembered...
That paints a rather depressing picture, 1K is considered acceptable these days, and I suppose it's true for lots of people that don't do write heavy workloads, so for the average consumer, that still is fine
enterprisedatacenter drives are going to be either QLC for dense storage or SLC for caching, with nothing in between. And no one will be developing new TLC technologies just for client PCs, we'll only be getting breadcrumbs from the AI DC table.You may be confusing the NAND chips endurance ratings (P/E cycles) with SSD endurance ratings (TBW divided by capacity).Anyways, even depressingly low numbers like 300 or even 240 (for an SSD, not a NAND chip) would be acceptable if the drives worked reliably till the last byte and then switched to a read-only state forever. A lot of anecdotal evidence tells us they often don't, and when they suddenly die, they are dead.
While seagate firecuda x1070 has qlc w 600tbw for 1tb capacity.
That would put SSDs in the same size and durability rank as the HDDs. ;)
In fact, I suspect that this P/E rating is for the complete Enterprise SSD, not for the NAND itself.
That is to say, I suspect that they are actually advertising that the drive itself is warrantied to be written to 3000x its capacity... but the drive, I am sure, has a pile of overprovisioning, and the controller is also working to compress the data transparently, so that less writes overall are needed 🤔
For PLC, I have not looked deeply into it, but I remember reading that its performance is similar to that of spinning rust.
At that point, I really have to question why you would bother with a PLC SSD, over just getting a denser classical storage HDD.
The only real advantage I can see, is that there would be no moving parts with a PLC SSD, which is not that big of an issue for a datacenter anyways.
PLC is not a viable tech and is VERY unlikely to be.That's possible. Either way, it's a mis-truth.