Micron announces new, 16nm TLC NAND

Micron has announced that it intends to ship a new, triple-level cell (TLC) NAND type for consumer devices, including SSDs. These new TLC devices will use the company’s cutting-edge 16nm NAND and, as the name implies, can store up to three bits of information per cell, up from two bits in standard MLC. The new TLC NAND will ship in 16GB capacity chips like previous MLC designs, but the dies are 28% smaller than the MLC variants.
Micron has previously produced TLC at higher process nodes, but the company hasn’t shipped it in consumer SSDs to-date.

The uncertain history of TLC

In theory, TLC drives offer the best of both worlds — improved storage densities for consumers, and superior prices for OEMs, thanks to higher storage capacities and lower chip costs. In practice, things haven’t turned out that way. The more bits of data you store per cell of NAND, the more charge levels you have to be able to distinguish. An SLC cell has two “values” — 0 or 1. An MLC cell, which stores two bits, has four values — we can represent them as 00, 01, 10, and 11. A TLC NAND cell, with three bits, has eight total values that must be stored.