Samsung&#39;s MMCmicro shrinks flash memory further
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Yet another card format is here, spun off of the venerable MMC format by Samsung. This one is small enough to fit on a key of a keyboard, or into the smallest device.
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The world's highest capacity flash-memory MP3 player -- for now
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Samsung Electronics has begun shipping a flash memory-based solid state disk drive (SSD) that offers better performance than many of the flash drives currently available, the company said.The 64GB drive has a SATA II interface that can support data reading at speeds of 100MBps and writing at 80MBps. That makes it 60 percent faster than SATA I drives of the same type and two to five times faster than conventional hard-disk drives, according to Samsung.SSDs use flash memory rather than magnetic storage, which means faster reading and writing of data, lower power consumption and zero noise. They&#39;ve been around for several years although it is only recently, after flash memory chip prices fell, that they have become practical for use in laptop computers.The drives were announced back in November when Samsung started supply samples of the drives to PC makers. Commercial versions of the drive are now available and will be offered as options on some Dell and Alienware laptops in the coming weeks, said Samsung. Prices were not announced.Samsung is also planning to target the enterprise server market and other applications that demand high-speed data transfer.Despite their advantages over hard-disk drives, SSDs are only taking off slowly because they are much more expensive. To get around this problem Samsung showed a 128GB SSD based on MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash, at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It&#39;s a cheaper but not as powerful or efficient version of flash chip than the SLC (single level cell) used in most SSDs drives until now. The SLC-type memory chips last about 10 times as long as MLC chips.&#160;
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Samsung is showing off a new 128G-byte flash-based SSD (solid-state drive), one of the largest such drives shown to date, at C.E.S.
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Samsung Electronics has succeeded in developing an 8-gigabit flash memory chip, breaking another world record in semiconductors, the company announced yesterday.
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics has squeezed 4GB of storage into a mobile phone chip set that the manufacturer believes could eliminate the need for external memory card slots. The embedded multichip system, called moviMCP, packs several memory functions into one unit, removing the need for an external expansion slot and thus freeing up space in tightly packed mobile phones, the company said Wednesday. The package includes two 16Gb NAND flash chips and a controller, a 1Gb mobile DRAM chip to support the processor and a 2Gb NAND flash chip for general handset operations. Samsung has used the eMMC interface, based on the MultiMedia Card association (MMCA) standard for embedded memory, in an effort to sidestep the difficulty of designing interfaces for different types of NAND flash memory. The standard is designed to eliminate the need to develop interface software for each type of NAND flash memory. The new multichip package will allow handset manufacturers not only to design smaller phones with higher storage capacity but also to significantly reduce the time required to develop these products, Samsung said. The moviMCP is available for OEM (original equipment manufacturer) sampling. Pricing information was not available.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Samsung ElectronicsÂ has begun shipping its first hybrid hard-disk drives that mix conventional magnetic storage with flash memory, it said Wednesday. The drives are designed for use in laptop PCs and willÂ work with the ReadyDrive featureÂ in the new Windows Vista operating system. Under ReadyDrive, the flash memory acts as a temporary cache enabling the number of disk accesses to be cut. This means the drive spends less time in motion and so uses less power. Samsung claims a 70 percent to 90 percent cut in power consumption thanks to the system. Because data can quickly be stored and retreived from the flash memory, ReadyDrive should also allow PCs to wake up faster from sleep mode. The first three drives from Samsung are 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB models and have either 128MB or 256MB of flash memory. That's the same flash capacity as prototypes Samsung unveiled at last year's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle in May. In July of last yearÂ Samsung followed up with a prototypeÂ that included 4GB of flash memory. Software support for ReadyDrive exists in Windows Vista only so PCs running other operating systems won't benefit from the technology. IntelÂ has a competing system that isÂ code-named Robson. It has the flash memory on the PC motherboard and will be included on Intel's new Santa Rosa laptop platform that is due in the second quarter of this year. Â
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By Bob Mims, The Salt Lake Tribune  Feb. 13--Fallout from Micron Technology Inc.'s dire price forecast for  the flash-style memory that powers everything from iPods to laptops sent its  stock and that of other semiconductor makers tumbling Monday.
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A new type of flash memory that will speed access to data stored on memory cards and mobile devices has received the support of several major phone and memory vendors.
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The Motley Fool - Today's flash memory chips store as many as 32 billion bits on a single chip. It's an impressive achievement, but manufacturers only have a few more years of squeezing those components into ever-smaller configurations before the whole process becomes either too expensive or physically impossible. That's why today's news from IBM (NYSE: IBM - News), Macronix (Nasdaq: MXIC - News), and Qimonda (NYSE: QI - News), announcing the creation of a new "phase-change" material that could lead to the development of more powerful memory chips, is a big deal.
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SanDisk Corp. has doubled the maximum capacities of its SanDisk miniSD and SanDisk RS-MMC memory cards to 512 megabytes. The popular cards are used in a variety of electronic
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SEOUL (Dow Jones)--A precipitous fall in prices for flash-memory chips and anticipated demand for next-generation DDR2 dynamic random access memory chips has spurred Samsung Electronics Co.
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And pushes PRAM into the limelight Samsung has developed a 40-nanometer memory device, which it today claimed is the first of its kind.â¦
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Samsung Electronics announced Monday that it has developed an 8GB NAND-type flash memory chip with a 60-nano design rule, paving the way for 16GB flash disks.
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Samsung unveiled a new mobile chipset with up to 4GB of storage capacity, potentially eliminating the need for add-on memory cards.
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics showed off its first 40-nanometer chip, a 32Gb NAND flash memory that can be used in memory cards able to store up to 64GB of data, or 40 movies. The latest step into smaller chip manufacturing methods brings Samsung to the forefront of chip production putting it ahead of other bit manufacturers, including Intel, which has onlyÂ announced chips built at 45nm. The chips are also the seventh generation of NAND flash memory to follow in a Moore's law-type theory posited by Samsung, that the company will double the capacity of NAND flash every 12 months. Such advances are vitalÂ to the consumer electronics industry. Users are demanding ever smaller devices that can do more, such as handsets with built-in mobile phone, computing, camera, and digital music playing functions. Demand for more storage to keep photos, videos, songs and other data has expanded rapidly over the past few years, and analysts expect the trend to continue. The 40nm chip production technique is key to making chips smaller, faster, more powerful, and cheaper to produce. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and the measurement is a guide to the size of the transistors and other parts that are etched onto the chips. Typically, the more transistors, and the closer they are together, the faster the chip can perform tasks. The company also revealed a new design technique, Charge Trap Flash (CTF), that will allow it to eventually shrink NAND chip features to 20nm, and produce 256Gb chips. In the 32Gb chips, the control gate in the CTF is only a fifth as big as conventional control gates on chips in a typical floating gate structure. With CTF, there is no floating gate. Instead, data is temporarily placed in a holding chamber made of silicon nitride. Samsung also released a new chip for its hybrid drives, a kind of hard disk drive aimed at laptops that uses NAND flash as a disk cache, to speed boot-up times and reduce power consumption The new chip, dubbed an SoC (system-on-chip) because it does the work of several chips, incorporates up to 4GB of NAND flash as a data buffer and helps further speeds boot-up times while lengthening battery life, the company said. The chips will be in mass production in November. Samsung is one of several companies working on hybrid drives. Seagate TechnologyÂ and IntelÂ are also developing the technology for notebook computers.