Stefan Mileschin

NAND flash memory prices are projected to climb in 2020. The manufacturing transitions to 96-layer 3D NAND and beyond are not going to increase bit output as quickly as demand will be growing. This will be a major change from the NAND oversupply that caused price crashes in 2018 and into 2019.

SSD controller vendor Phison is betting that increasing prices will finally push the consumer SSD market to embrace 4 bit per cell QLC NAND flash memory, which thus far has seen only limited success in the retail SSD market and virtually no adoption from PC OEMs. The price premium for SSDs with 3 bit per cell TLC NAND has been small or non-existent across all market segments, so the performance and endurance advantages of sticking with TLC NAND have been worthwhile. Those days may be coming to an end. Phison expects—quite reasonably—that when NAND flash memory supplies are constrained the bulk of the TLC NAND manufactured will be snatched up by the higher-paying enterprise SSD customers, more or less forcing the consumer SSD market to start shifting toward using QLC as the mainstream option.

In preparation for this shift, Phison is making sure that their full controller lineup is ready to work with QLC NAND. That means tuning the controller firmware to make the best of the lower performance of TLC NAND. For the OEM market in particular, they also have to update any of the older controllers whose error-correction capabilities aren't up to the task of supporting a 5-year warranty with the lower endurance of QLC.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15416...-go-mainstream