Samsung Achieves Major Breakthrough With New NAND Flash Technology That Reduces Power Consumption by 96 Percent
Samsung continues to reinforce its leadership in next generation memory as the company pushes toward LPDDR6, expected to debut at CES next year. In a parallel development, the Korean tech giant has achieved a major scientific breakthrough by creating a new form of NAND flash storage that consumes 96 percent less power. With AI data centers, smartphones, and edge devices demanding exponentially more memory, this innovation arrives at a critical moment for the semiconductor industry.
The breakthrough centers on a new NAND architecture that uses Ferroelectric Transistors, enabling unprecedented power savings while supporting the scaling demands necessary for higher density NAND. The findings were published in the academic journal Nature through a research paper entitled “Ferroelectric Transistor for Low Power NAND Flash Memory”. The work involved a team of thirty four researchers who examined oxide semiconductors that were originally seen as unsuitable for high performance chips due to high threshold voltage.
According to Sedaily, these high threshold voltages ultimately revealed a strategic advantage. By blocking currents under the threshold level, the researchers found they could significantly reduce leakage current and improve power efficiency. This is particularly valuable in NAND flash, which relies on a string of connected cells. As cell counts rise and layer stacks grow taller, leakage continues to increase and pushes power demand upward during both read and write operations.
The research team introduced a mechanism that addresses these limitations directly, reducing power consumption by an estimated 96 percent compared to traditional NAND flash technologies. While the paper does not provide a commercialization timeline, the implications are wide ranging. Once mass production begins, everything from smartphones to AI servers and edge compute systems could benefit from significantly lower energy usage and improved performance per watt.
For now, the industry will continue moving toward UFS 5.0 implementations in mobile hardware while watching closely for Samsung’s next step in bringing this breakthrough to market. The hope is that production remains on track without unforeseen issues, allowing this transformative memory technology to power the next generation of intelligent devices.
Do you think breakthroughs like this will be enough to keep pace with the exploding power demands of AI and mobile computing, or will we need even more radical memory innovations in the near future?
