Micron to offer 16nm TLC NAND flash memory in Q4 2014

Micron said it will launch its 16nm TLC (triple-level-cell) NAND flash memory in the final quarter of this year. It's unknown when the company will launch TLC-based SSDs but Marc Durcan, chief executive officer and president of Micron, suggested that a large scale rollout of TLC is unlikely to happen until 2015.

TLC NAND flash memory is already available on the market but so far it has limited success. This new type of flash memory promises to be more cost-effective than MLC NAND flash memory but has a much lower durability.

“Initial applications for our 16nm TLC components will be more consumer and retail oriented upfront,” said Marc Durcan, chief executive officer and president of Micron. “To-date no one has had a lot of success even on the client side enabling TLC memory. There is a lot of work being done […] around controller development […] because I think that is where the error correction and capabilities around enabling TLC to be reliable enough to ship in [the SSD] segment. But we still think that is kind of a 2015 calendar year phenomenon, we do not see that happening in large scale in calendar ‘14.”

Source KitGuru