There is an industry effort to make NAND flash storage as cheap as HDD storage per GB. We’ve talked about it many times already, the next big step in NAND development to achieve that goal is QLC NAND memory. We expected good quantities of QLC NAND products in Q4 already, however as you have been able to notice. They are abundantly missing in quantity.
As it turns out now, QLC NAND (4 bits per cell written) production is suffering from really bad wafer yields. In a report posted at Digitimes, they claim the yields per NAND wafer are less than 50%, meaning 50% of the chips actually work and yes it is a bit of a paradox as such drop-offs numbers in QLC right make it too expensive to fab, or sell at competitive prices which is kind of the sole reason of existence for this NAND storage type.
The end result is that it’ll take a much longer before QLC NAND sees proper market penetration, the fabrication process needs to be further improved and optimized until then TLC will be the best selling NAND type. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Toshiba/ Western Digital and Micron Technology and Intel have all introduced their 3D QLC NAND technologies and products.
