[THE INVESTOR] The chief of Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor business division expects NAND flash memory chips with 100 layers of cells stacked inside to rollout in the global market soon.

“Samsung, which rolled out the 24-layer V-NAND in August 2013, for the first time in the world, will start to mass-produce the 64-layer V-NAND chip by the end of this year. I believe the 1 terabit NAND flash will soon hit the market, and that means a chipmaker can stack up 100 layers of cells inside a chip,” Kim Ki-nam, the chief of Samsung’s chip business division, said at the Flash Memory Summit, an annual NAND memory chip industry conference, in Santa Clara, US.

The Samsung semiconductor chief received an award at the conference for his leading role in increasing the memory capacity of the NAND flash chip twofold every year from 2 gigabit in 2002 to 32 gigabit in 2006.

The South Korean tech giant, one of the leading global chipmakers, has led the vertical NAND flash memory sector since it mass-produced the first generation V-NAND flash memory chip with 24 layers of cells.

Since then Samsung released 32-layer and 48-layer V-NAND flash memory chips in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and newly unveiled a 64-layer chip at the Flash Memory Summit, an annual NAND memory chip industry conference, in

Samsung’s market share in the NAND flash memory sector stood at 42.6 percent in the first quarter this year, outpacing its rivals Toshiba of Japan and Micron of the US, which took up 28 percent and 18.8 percent, respectively, during the same period.

By Kim Young-won (wone010@heraldcorp.com">wone010@heraldcorp.com)