Intel Invests in NAND Flash Memory
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Intel will invest $65 million in Taiwanese chip assembler that specializes in flash memory and DRAM.
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LOS ANGELES, Feb 26  â Intel, the chip maker, said on Monday that it would spend $1 billion to $1.5 billion to retool a factory in New Mexico to start making chips with advanced 45-nanometer-wide transistors in the second half of 2008.
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Through-silicon vias to boost storage capacities Toshiba has applied the through-silicon via (TSV) technique - chip makers' flavour-of-the-month technology - to boost the capacity of NAND Flash chips with only a "minimal" increase in chip size and no need for a new fabrication node.â¦
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A massive decline in the price of NAND flash memory, the chips that store photos in digital cameras and music in iPods, is prompting innovation among companies trying to increase sales.A few of the items users are likely to see more widespread in gadgets this year include greatly expanded storage capacity in SD (secure digital) cards, USB (universal serial bus) flash sticks and internal storage, as well as new, lower-cost SSDs (solid-state discs) in notebook computers.The price of mainstream 4Gb SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash memory chips has fallen 73 percent since mid-August to $4.96 late Thursday, according to DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online clearinghouse for the chips. The chips hit a high of $18.50 on Aug. 14. The price of 4Gb MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash chips have taken a slightly worse dive, 75 percent down to $2.23 on Thursday, compared to its summer high of $8.85 per chip.The difference between SLC and MLC is cost and life span. SLC normally costs about three times more than MLC, and has a lifetime of 100,000 write cycles. MLC has a lifetime of only 10,000 write cycles.Toshiba and Samsung have both developed new 128GB SSDs based in MLC NAND to expand their use in notebook PCs. The new SSDs are less expensive, giving notebook PC designers more choices in storage.&quot;At 128G bytes, you&#39;re giving consumers the kind of storage space they expect in a notebook,&quot; said Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing at Samsung, in an interview.To work around the lifespan issue, Toshiba and Samsung use controller chips to spread writes across the drive to avoid wearing out any one portion too quickly.The new MLC-based drives are an important step forward for SSDs in the battle against hard disk drives (HDD). At 128GB, an SSD stands are far better chance of replacing an HDD in laptop computers because it removes some of the high-capacity advantage HDDs hold.SSDs have several advantages over HDDs; they&#39;re lighter, more rugged, consume less power, make no noise and enable a computer to start up and load software faster than HDDs. But SSDs are a lot more expensive than HDDs, which is why they&#39;re mainly used in the business laptop market, where users are willing to pay more for performance and reliability.Elliott believes SSDs for PCs will account for 27 percent of NAND consumption by 2011, particularly in business laptops and mobile devices.SanDisk has taken a slightly different route in SSDs than Toshiba and Samsung. The company made a 72GB SSD in a thinner form factor aimed at mobile devices. The drive takes up less space, so it could be used in a range of mobile devices, said Iri Trashanski, director of strategic business development at SanDisk.He doesn&#39;t believe there will be a market for 128GB SSDs for a while.Brian Kumagi, senior business development manager NAND flash memory business at Toshiba, believes the lower cost of MLC NAND chips will play a major role in seeing 128GB SSDs gain market share.Toshiba is also offering MLC NAND SSDs in 32GB and 64GB capacities to entice laptop PC makers and makers of digital music players and other devices requiring more storage.There are several other products where companies are adding NAND flash to increase storage capacity and improve devices. One, thanks to the iPhone, is handsets, said Elliott.Multimedia handsets will likely see 8GB of embedded flash memory become the standard this year, and card slots are being added to a host of mobile phones to increase storage and for added content delivery, including movies, games, software and more.Plus, low prices are encouraging new innovation, just as low NAND prices helped put the chips into more iPods earlier this decade. One area is in video cameras, namely, Flip video and similar devices.For $119.99, users can buy a Flip video camcorder that uses NAND flash memory to store 30 minutes of recordings.In addition, devices such as GPS (global positioning system) for cars will need more flash when 3D (three dimensional) digital maps start replacing 2D maps.The good news for users is that there are so many NAND flash memory makers in the world today that prices will remain low or at least reasonable for a long time.In a report titled &quot;Flash to crash,&quot; Macquarie Securities chip analyst Warren Lau wrote that NAND flash memory prices will likely remain low throughout the first half of this year, with little room for upside until the third quarter.&quot;We continue to warn that NAND flash will see excess supply in the first half of 2008 owing to aggressive production ramp (at IM Flash and Toshiba) and the seasonally weaker period for consumer products (digital still cameras, handsets and MP3),&quot; he wrote.Much of the possible price movements in NAND flash actually depend on Apple because of the widespread popularity of the iPod and iPhone.The company announced it has already shipped over 4 million iPhones and continues to ramp shipments. iPod shipment growth has dropped a bit, according to market researcher Gartner, but higher capacity iPod products such as the Touch have done well in the market.&quot;Apple is a critical driver of NAND flash consumption and will continue to yield great influence on NAND flash vendors,&quot; Gartner said in a report on Monday.
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Intel, the world&#39;s biggest semiconductor maker, said Monday it built a test chip with a new process that creates faster circuits by packing 10 million transistors into an area the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen.
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(InfoWorld) - Toshiba Corp. is expanding production of NAND flash memory chips faster than originally planned, the company said Monday. The company is one of the world's largest producers of flash memory chips, which are used in a wide range of consumer electronics products including digital still cameras, music players, cell phones and memory cards. At present most of Toshiba's production in its number-three chip factory is done on a manufacturing line that can make chips with features as small as 70 nanometers but in January the company began using a more advanced 56-nanometer production process. The 56-nanometer technology means chips can be made physically smaller so more fit on a wafer and made more efficient. This means the resulting chips are cheaper and use less power. Toshiba had planned to increase 56-nanometer production so it equalled half of the company's 135,000 wafer per month output by the end of this year but now Toshiba is planning to meet that point in September. The faster-than-anticipated switch to new production should make Toshiba's NAND flash more competitive on the global market. The Tokyo company also said it plans to re-equip its number-four chip fabrication facility to handle 56-nanometer production. The new building will have a clean-room production area about 40 percent bigger than the number-three factory.
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A chip the size of a fingernail and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second is unveiled by Intel.
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Hewlett-Packard is preparing its first laptop with flash memory chips in another sign of the market's gradual migration away from the use of hard drives to store data and software.
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InfoWorld - Breaking the speed barrier of traditional flash memory, Intel and Micron Thursday announced a new flash memory architecture that increases the data transfer rates in consumer electronics by cutting the bottlenecks affecting conventional NAND flash memory.
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64GB NAND flash memory drives will be an option in a forthcoming Compaq series.
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Toshiba expects demand for NAND, widely used for data storage in portable electronics like Apple Inc.'s Pod digital media player devices, to grow by an average 130% a year between 2006 and 2010.
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Intel is investing $40 million over the next two years to expand its development center in Bangalore, the company said Friday. Intel has invested a similar amount on the facility since January last year.  Intel Chief Executive Officer Craig Barrett wound up his two-day visit to India on Friday by laying the foundation stone for the second building at the 43-acre Intel campus in Bangalore. The new wing is scheduled to be in operation by August next year.  The new funding will be used to develop next-generation chipsets based on the Centrino mobile technology platform, as well as for development and validation of laptop motherboards and thermal design support. Intel also is investing in the design and development of Windows-based graphics drivers for the Intel Extreme Graphics and Intel Graphics Media Accelerator product families.  The center will also develop enterprise microprocessors, including all aspects of VLSI (very large scale integration) design and development.  Bangalore has become a key design location for Intel. The development center there is already working on a variety of designs, including a 32-bit microprocessor for the enterprise market. Intel is also evaluating India as a possible location for a chip manufacturing facility, Barrett said.
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Intel have announced that they&#39;ve produced a fully functioning memory chip using 35 nanometer transistors. The breakthrough, etching components that are 30% smaller than current processes, should be delivering
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The company plans to present a paper this week outlining a new type of memory that could help boost processor performance.
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A new semiconductor alloy jointly developed by IBM and its partners will spur the development of faster and smaller memory chips. The companies say the advancements would lead to smaller chips than currently possible with flash memory.
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Samsung Electronics has developed a chip-manufacturing technique able to significantly increase the amount of music, pictures, videos, and other data people can store in future iPods, iPhones, and other devices.The world&#39;s largest memory chip maker showed off a 64Gb multilevel cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chip made with an entirely new 30-nanometer production technology. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and the measure refers to the average size of the smallest features on the chip. The manufacturing breakthrough, which Samsung calls self-aligned double patterning technology (SaDPT), will enable the company to greatly increase the storage capacity of new NAND flash memory chips once the technology is in commercial production.For example, 16 of the 64Gb chips can be combined in a memory card for 128GB of storage space, enough for 80 DVD movies or 32,000 MP3 music files, the company said in a statement.Even more important for users, Samsung was able to make the technology leap without requiring certain expensive new chip making equipment. While moves to smaller production technologies often require investment in expensive new photolithography equipment, the company was able to use current photolithography gear to etch circuits on the silicon wafers. That should ensure low production costs and reasonable prices for end-users.SaDPT technology uses two pattern transfers to create the circuit design of each chip. The first transfer spaces the circuits widely apart, then the second transfer uses that space between the circuits to add another circuit, with the result that the circuitry is more densely packed together.Samsung has applied for 30 patents related to the new 64Gb flash chip, and said it also created a 32Gb chip with the same production technology. The company expects to begin mass production of 64Gb flash chips with its 30nm manufacturing technology in 2009.
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Pricey but fast IDF Intel plans to shakeup the storage market in 2008 with the introduction of solid-state disks designed for data center hardware.â¦