Toshiba on Wednesday said that it had begun to sample its latest BiCS 3D NAND flash memory chips with 64 word layers and 512 Gb capacity. A co-development project with Western Digital, the two companies intend to produce the new ICs (integrated circuits) in high volume sometimes in the second half of this year. Among the first products to use the new chips will be Toshiba's BGA SSD with 1 TB capacity.

Looking at the specifications, Toshibas 512 Gb (64 GB) 64-layer BiCS 3D NAND will be TLC-based, with the use of TLC being unsurprising here as all makers of non-volatile memory nowadays concentrate on TLC ICs for SSDs. Toshiba as well as its fab and development partner (Western Digital) has not formally revealed the interface speed of their new 512 Gb 3D NAND ICs nor the number of planes per IC, but these are details that the companies are probably going to share when they are ready to ship such devices in high volume (or simply decide to publish their ISSCC presentation from earlier this month).