In an event held in Japan earlier this week Toshiba outlined its future strategy for memory and storage businesses. The company will focus in enterprise-grade SSDs, while keeping the advantage of its profitable NAND flash memories.
Toshiba's executives
said that the company would focus on reducing bit cost by increasing the ratio of 3-bit-per-cell (TLC) memories and employ 1Znm process technology, which follows 1Ynm process technology (the second generation of 19nm process technology). Then, the company will switch to the "BiCS (Bit Cost Scalable)" 3D memory, which three-dimensionally stacks multiple layers of memory cells, to keep the lowered cost.
Toshiba will start shipping 1Znm products in fiscal 2014 and samples of the first-generation BiCS memory at the end of fiscal 2013. After spreading the samples in the market in fiscal 2014, the company plans to start volume production in fiscal 2015.
In the storage business, Toshiba will shift focus from client HDDs to enterprise HDDs and SSDs for servers. In addition, the company will focus on SSDs used for cache memory. Toshiba plans to release high-speed SSDs equipped with a PCI Express interface for the enterprise.