On November 27, 2025, SAIT (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology), the comprehensive research organization under Samsung Electronics, announced that its team has published a breakthrough result on a new NAND Flash architecture in the top international journal Nature. According to the research, by combining ferroelectric semiconductors and oxide semiconductors, the new NAND cell can achieve over 90% power reduction during string operations and also shows high scalability and multi-bit storage capability. This technology is expected to have a deep impact on the energy efficiency of AI data centers and mobile devices.
New Architecture Achieves Ultra-Low Power and Multi-Level Storage
According to Samsung SAIT, the FeFET/Fe-NAND structure proposed in the paper uses the polarization characteristics of ferroelectric thin films to store data. This greatly reduces the dependence on high voltage and large write energy seen in traditional floating-gate or charge-trap structures.
At the same time, oxide semiconductors have extremely low leakage current, allowing the NAND string to operate with almost zero pass voltage during read/write processes. This material combination directly brings a huge drop in energy consumption. The data shown in the paper indicates that during typical string operations, the new structure can achieve more than 90% and up to about 96% power savings.
Even more promising, the ferroelectric structure naturally supports multi-level storage. Experiments show it can achieve up to 5 bits per cell, meaning future storage density can increase within limited area, matching and even surpassing the industry’s current QLC (4-bit) direction.
AI Data Centers and Mobile Devices Will Benefit Greatly
This technology is seen as a disruptive addition to current NAND architectures, especially at a time when power consumption has become a major bottleneck.
In AI data centers, model training and inference require frequent reading and writing of huge datasets, making storage power consumption rise steadily. If the new Fe-NAND can reach mass production after engineering development, its 90% operation-power reduction will directly boost overall data-center energy efficiency, lower electricity costs, and reduce heat-generation pressure for large computing facilities.
In mobile and edge devices, the advantages in write power and standby power will extend battery life and support more complex on-device AI processing, especially for offline inference, continuous sensing tasks, and high-bandwidth data caching.
Meanwhile, ferroelectric devices are also naturally suitable for future compute-in-memory architectures, offering potential for neuromorphic hardware.
Multiple Engineering Challenges Must Be Solved Before Mass Production
Although the paper’s results are exciting, industry experts point out that commercial products will require overcoming several engineering barriers, including:
- Manufacturing compatibility: The deposition and thermal processing of ferroelectric thin films—and their compatibility with existing 3D V-NAND processes—need further validation, especially regarding yield and stability in high-stack structures.
- Endurance and data retention: Commercial NAND requires far more write cycles and long-term data retention than academic experiments. The long-term performance of ferroelectric materials in large arrays needs more testing.
- Device consistency and error control: Multi-level programming has extremely strict noise tolerance and requires joint optimization with ECC and system-level programming algorithms.
- Cost and yield: Introducing new materials and new structures into mature production lines inevitably brings challenges in cost, process windows, and mass-production quality.
For these reasons, the industry generally believes that in the short term (1–3 years), sample chips or small-scale products may appear first in special-purpose or high-value markets, while entry into mainstream consumer or enterprise storage will take longer.
Overall, the new Fe-NAND architecture announced by Samsung SAIT in Nature shows a possible future direction for NAND Flash: achieving a major improvement in energy efficiency without sacrificing capacity or storage density. If future engineering progress goes smoothly, this technology may become a key foundation for the next generation of low-power non-volatile memory—especially meaningful in an AI-driven, high-power-consumption era.
