Single-gate vertical channel (SGVC)

Macronix is releasing details of a new 3D NAND structure, called single-gate vertical channel (SGVC).

The outfit will present a paper on the new tech at the 2017 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) which is taking place in San Francisco, USA.

The paper selected focuses on realizing a 128Gb MLC (or 192Gb TLC) 3D NAND Flash using the SGVC architecture with only 16 layers. Such memory density is comparable to 48-layer 3D NAND using a popular gate-all-around (GAA) structure.

SGVC has the important advantage of much smaller cell size and pitch scaling capability which allows very high-density memory with much fewer stacking layers.

The 3D SGVC NAND makes use of arrays of vertically arranged single-gate flat-cell thin film transistors with an ultra-thin body, which aren't as sensitive to variation of critical dimensions (CD) as GAA devices, and is very suitable for read-intensive memory applications.

No clear idea if this will ever make a product, but apparently the technology is feasible.