On Tuesday, Micron Technology announced that it had begun shipping its most advanced NAND flash chip, which has 232 layers of memory cells and can handle large data usage from consumer devices, cars, and data centers.

Compare to DRAM chips, which lose data when the power is switched off, NAND flash chips are storage chips that maintain data even when a device is turned off.

Alvaro Toledo, VP and general manager of the data center storage division at Micron, said that the latest chip transfers data 50% faster than Micron’s previous generation NAND chips.

In opposite to logic chips, which have become faster with smaller transistor sizes, storage chips have recently added more layers as a result of problems in achieving the benefits and cost reductions required just by improving the transistor size.

According to Toledo, 16 of these 232-layer NAND chips may be packed together and have a storage capacity of 2TB in a container that is roughly the size of a stamp.

He stated that the 232-layer NAND mass production is expected to begin in late 2022.