Despite facing a variety of finance related issues over the past year, Toshiba appears to be committed to flash memory as ever. Due to the ongoing NAND shortage, many flash memory producers have started work on new fabs. Today, Toshiba announced their plans to start construction on their new Fab 6 at Yokkaichi Operations in Mie prefecture, Japan.
Fab 6 will be dedicated to the production of BiCS FLASH which is Toshiba’s 3D NAND. BiCS FLASH is capable of being made up to 64 layers and in 512 Gb capacity which should help ease the NAND shortage. In order to best align the construction and ramp up with demand, the fab will be constructed in two phases. Phase 1 is expected to be completed in 2018 which should provide a nice boost to production.
Along with the new Fab 6, Toshiba is also building a new Memory R&D Center next to the fab. This center will be completed by the end of 2017. Along with WD and their future partner unnamed partner, Toshiba looks to betting heavily on NAND which seems like a pretty smart move right now. Hopefully, the new NAND and new fabs will help keep SSD prices down and ease the pain of the shortage.
