Second time's a charm? WD tries again with 3D NAND, doubles capacity WD is firing up an early production run of its 512Gbit 64-layer 3D NAND chip at its Yokkaichi, Japan, foundry, with its partner Toshiba. The silicon uses a triple-level cell (TLC) flash design, which stores three bits per cell. Progressing from this pilot job to mass manufacturing will take at least six months, so don't expect …
Three levels? Initially I thought they would be for 'True', 'False' and 'Mu' , but Wikipedia tells me it is a four-bit-per-cell (16 levels) device to allow for all that error correcting cleverness that's needed here.
Yes. I too need a beer after trying to get my head round all that.
@ColonelDare
My take on that excerpt (and I have read the wiki article as well) was that the SanDisk X4 is using 4 bit cells, Samsung are using only 3 bit cells. Either way, my original response was aimed at JeffyPoooh rather than yourself :)
@JeffyPoooh
I understand binary, however I still think your misunderstanding (or just making a joke?) the concept. A single bit has 2 states, either on (1) or off (0), this is a single layer cell (SLC), despite the fact that it has 2 states, it is still a SLC not a 2 layer cell. By creating a 3 bit cell, they are correctly referring to it as a triple layer cell (TLC), as it is 3 times the bit capacity of a SLC. Yes it allows for 8 different states as each bit can still be on or off (000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111) however it is still 3 bits vs 1 bit. Hence TLC vs SLC.
Apologies if you were going for sarcasm/joke, it didn't come across.
@2460
The only intended joke was the "Decimal 5" = Binary 101. (<- that's actually hilarious)
The basic issue is that "level" in this context means voltages. It doesn't mean physical levels. A so-called "Triple Level Cell" is just *a* (singular) cell (ONE cell storing ONE voltage). They use EIGHT different voltage LEVELS to store the three bits.
That's the point of the Industry Standard misnomer.
A TLC is actually an 8LC storing 3-bits.
The problem with their naming scheme is that they've left themselves an ever-increasing gap in their poorly chosen scheme.
One could imaging that the maximum number of voltage levels isn't a power of two. But the data could be smeared over several cells. Their naming scheme leaves no room for this obvious intermediary technology.
They should have invited me to the meeting. All this is obvious.
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