Smartphone with 384GB of on-board storage, anyone? Samsung develops 3D flash memory chip

Future smartphones could see significantly greater built-in flash storage as Samsung has successfully demonstrated a way to overcome the typical 16-64GB limit of individual memory chips, reports Engadget.

The main challenge in producing higher-capacity flash storage is one of scale — as density goes up, so does cell interference and the chances of a breakdown. Samsung may have overcome that barrier (if temporarily) by mass-producing the first 3D vertical NAND memory, or V-NAND

This is the reason that, if you open up a typical SSD, you’ll find it’s made up of a whole bunch of 16GB chips – and the reason that squeezing much more than 64Gb storage into a smartphone gets challenging. Samsung had previously managed to squeeze 64GB into a single NAND chip, but when you can stack up to 24 layers of 16GB storage on top of each other in a chip not much thicker than existing ones, you create the potential for up to 384GB on a single chip.

We may not be seeing that kind of storage in a phone anytime soon, but we can certainly expect capacities to increase and SSDs to get cheaper once the new chips are in mass production.