Micron today announced that the company is sampling 16 nm MLC NAND. The currently smallest commercially available NAND is 19 nm of which Toshiba recently announced it's starting production of the second generation.
Smaller NAND means cheaper production which results in cheaper SSDs or higher capacity drives at the same price. Micron states in the announcement that they will be able to create nearly 6 TB of storage from a single wafer.
The company is sampling the 16nm, 128Gb MLC NAND with select partners now and plans to be in full production in the fourth quarter of 2013. Micron is also developing a new line of solid-state drive solutions based on this NAND and expects to ship SSDs with 16nm flash by 2014.
Micron is in a joint-venture with Intel called IM Flash Technology, it's likely that this NAND will end up in Micron and Intel SSDs.
