According to a recent joint press release, Toshiba and SanDisk has recently announced plans to build a new fab to replace Fab 2 in Yokkaichi Japan to help the companies’ transition to 3D NAND technology. Toshiba/SanDisk expects to begin construction on the new fab in September this year with a completion date sometime in Summer 2015.
Given the difficulty and increased cost of shrinking NAND further than 1xnm, 3D NAND is expected to be the logical successor to current 2D Planar NAND. Currently, the only NAND/SSD manufacturer mass producing 3D NAND is Samsung with their 40nm V-NAND technology. Micron recently pushed back sampling of their 3D NAND and SK Hynix is expected to begin sampling their 3D NAND soon. Toshiba/SanDisk expects to begin mass production of their BiCS (Bit Cost Scalable) 3D NAND by 2016.
