World’s first 128Gb 20nm MLC NAND announced by Intel and Micron

Intel and Micron has announced the world’s first 20nm fab 128Gb (16GB) MLC NAND storage (used for SSDs and flash storage) ion. How does this help really? First, thanks to smaller fabrication, the die size reduces which means that one can add more storage to same sized HDD. Second, this reduces the manufacturing costs and will make SSDs cheaper. According to Anandtech, a single 8GB 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND die built on IMFT's 25nm process measures in at 167mm², while the same capacity on IMFT's 20nm process is 118mm^2. In addition to smaller die size, this new NAND will feature ONFi 3 interface which supports transfer speeds upto 400MB/s (ONFi 2.x had upto 200MB/s), has more efficient PCB routing, supports EZ-NAND interface, larger 16KB pages. 128Gb 20nm NAND will go into production in Q2 2012 but SSDs based on this will not be available until 2013 as adding 128Gb NAND with ONFi 3 requires revision to controller and firmware and also manufacturers will have to wait till the yields become cheaper with high success rate. Lets hope that we will see cheaper 1TB SSDs and we might even see 2TB SSDs.