The smartphone has become one of the most important devices in the world today, enabling people around the globe to connect, communicate, create and consume content. More than 1.5 billion smartphones were sold in 2016, taking the total smartphone user base close to 2.5 billion users. With rise of smartphones, some key trends like social media, hardware advancements, expanding OS size and App installs, have been driving higher storage capacity requirement in smartphones. The need to incorporate greater storage capacities while simultaneously optimizing a device’s Bill of Materials (BoM) costs to hit key price points (to ensure that the devices are affordable, competitive and economically viable), we are seeing significant efforts from the memory suppliers to offer higher capacity and advanced NAND flash memory solutions. As a result, the industry has moved from SLC (single-bit per cell) and 2-bit MLC (two bits per cell), to a higher density TLC or 3-bit MLC (three bits per cell or triple-level-cell).
- TLC solutions suppliers have adopted various techniques to improve both the software and the architecture of this managed NAND solution, boosting the performance and the overall user experience.
- This has allowed TLC to go mainstream across memory categories from SSD, embedded, and SD cards to device categories such as desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets.
- TLC is becoming an obvious choice compared to MLC solutions – not only for reasons of cost and density but also for performance and reliability, even with rising read and write intensity on smartphones.
- TLC memory is now present in almost one of every three smartphones sold globally. In terms of the number of petabytes of storage shipped, smartphones with TLC-based storage will surpass MLC-based smartphones starting this year.
