Samsung boosts NAND flash memory capacity
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Company alters traditional chip configuration to pack more memory into an even smaller unit.
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SanDisk on Tuesday announced new flash memory cards with higher capacities, designed to fit into consumer gizmos like digital cameras, camcorders and cell phones.
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Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the world's third-largest handset maker, said on Tuesday it was launching the first mobile phone with a stamp-sized hard disc drive this month that would expand the memory capacity by 15 times.
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64GB NAND flash memory drives will be an option in a forthcoming Compaq series.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Samsung ElectronicsÂ is using a more advanced production method to push graphics memory chips to a higher speed. The company, which is one of the world's biggest chip makers, said Friday it has managed to make GDDR4 (graphics double data rate 4) memory chips that work at 4Gbps. That's two-thirds faster than the current fastest GDDR4 chips generally available, which operate at 2.4Gbps, Samsung said. It managed to make the higher speed chips by using 80 nanometer production technology. A nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter and the measurement refers to the size of the smallest feature on a chip's surface. As these sizes get smaller, chips can be made more compact, use less energy and work at higher speeds. Samsung's first 4Gbps GDDR4 memory will be a 512Mb (64MB) chip. The South Korean company will begin offering sample chips to customers this month and mass production will come later this year.
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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced  semiconductor technology, announced that it has begun mass producing  1.8-inch solid state drives (SSD) at 64GB (gigabytes) --  the highest density SSD available today for mobile computing  applications.
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SanDisk Corp. on Tuesday introduced new high-end capacities of 4GB, 1GB and 2GB for its Memory Stick Pro, Memory Stick Pro Duo and SD storage cards, respectively, as well as an increase to 512MB for its miniSD and RS-MMC media for cell phones.
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics is sampling a new type of flash memory device that could make it easier for makers of mobile phones and MP3 players to increase the storage capacity of their products. Samsung's moviNAND devices combine a NAND flash memory chip, an MMC (multimedia card) controller, and some firmware into a component that's small enough to be used in the latest portable electronics products, the company said. Samsung has started shipping samples of 1GB and 2GB moviNAND chips to manufacturers and will begin mass producing them later this month. It plans to introduce 512MB and 4GB capacities by the end of this year, it said. MoviNAND solves allows device makers to include a large amount of flash memory in their products while still using a standard serial interface, the company said. "The significance of the MMC interface is that the complexities of the native NAND interface and management are completely abstracted from the [portable device]," Samsung spokesman John Lucas said via e-mail. In addition, the MMC interface performance better than other standard interfaces because it has an 8-bit wide bus, allowing data to be processed at up to 52MB per second, he said. NAND flash has become popular for its ability to store large amounts of data at relatively low cost and to retain that data when devices are switched off. It's used in memory sticks, memory cards and digital music players such as Apple Computer's iPod. Other NAND makers include Toshiba, Hynix Semiconductor, and IM Flash Technologies. It's one of several recent flash memory advancements from Samsung. On Monday the South Korean companyÂ showed off a 32GB NAND flash memory chipÂ built using an advanced, 40-nanometer manufacturing process.
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Samsung&#39;s advanced 60nm process technology is two thousandths the width of a piece of human hair and achieves approximately 30 percent reduction in cell size over the 70nm 4Gb NAND Flash memory developed last year.
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Smaller-capacity versions coming Q1 2008 Chip giant Intel has begun sampling a solid-state drive (SSD) designed for handheld devices. The product's known in the trade as 'a stack of Flash chips'.â¦
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The world's highest capacity flash-memory MP3 player -- for now
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Seoul, South Korea-based Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has begun shipping a 512Mbit GDDR2 memory device, one it claims is the most advanced graphics double-data-rate synchronous DRAM available.
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(InfoWorld) - IntelÂ  threw down a gantlet today by entering the solid-state drive market with its first NAND flash memory product. The Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive represents a challenge to Samsung Corp., which is the world's largest producer of NAND flash memory for hardware and gadgets such as USB flash drives. The Z-U130 comes in capacities ranging from 1GB to 8GB and uses industry-standard USB interfaces, the company stated in a press release. The flash drive comes with reads rates of 28MB/sec. and write speeds of 20MB/sec. Intel expectsÂ its solid-state disk to be used in everything from servers and PCs toÂ gaming consoles. Intel's first entry into the solid-state disk market is still four times smaller in capacity compared withÂ otherÂ industry-leadingÂ products from companies such as SanDisk Corp. SanDiskÂ announced aÂ 32GB solid-state disk product in January (see "SanDisk shows solid-state drive "). But Intel also touts extreme reliability numbers, saying theÂ Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which toutsÂ an MTBF of 2 million hours. Intel touted solid-state disk as a faster storage alternative that speeds through common PC or embedded application operations such as locating boot code, operating systems and commonly accessed libraries. It said its productÂ offers "cost-effective," high-performance storage with advantages over hard disk drives or removable Universal Serial Bus storage devices. Samsung recently announced its first hybrid drive, which uses NAND flash memory with spinning disk. That drive offers capacities of 80GB, 120GB and 160GB, along with 4GB of flash memory for caching data (see "Samsung ships its first hybrid disk drive"). Solid-state drives deliver faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid data access and low-power storage alternatives for value PCs, routers, servers, and gaming and industrial applications. "Solid-state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives, including improved performance and reliability," said Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager of Intel's NAND products group. The Z-U130 solid-state drive is the company's first product in what Intel said will be a family ofÂ  value solid-state drives. The Z-U130 comes in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB densities. Intel said it has already made deals with server, notebook and PC manufacturers to include the Z-U130. The company's solid-state disk will also be used in Intel-embedded products for routers and point of sale terminals, it noted.
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Samsung has begun shipments of the first hybrid flash memory hard drive to its OEM partners. Retail shipments are expected to begin soon, however the company has not specified a date.
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(InfoWorld) - Flash memory and hard-disk drives could face a challenge from a new chip technology, dubbed phase-change memory, being developed by a group of companies led by IBM. The companies on Monday announced the results of their latest research into the technology, which they say will do a better job of storing songs, pictures, and other data on iPods and digital cameras than current flash memory, and could someday replace disk drives. Among the advances, the companies have built a prototype device that runs 500 times faster than today's flash memory while using half as much power to write data to a memory cell, they said. The circuits on the device are much smaller than those on today's flash chips, measuring just 3 by 20 nanometers, and show that, unlike flash, phase-change memory will be suitable for production on the advanced manufacturing techniques targeted for use in 2015, the companies said. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. The progress came partly from the development of a new material to build the memory chips, a germanium alloy to which the researchers added other elements to enhance its properties. The companies have applied for a patent for the material, they said. Besides IBM, the developers include Qimonda, the DRAM spin-off from Infineon Technologies, and Taiwan's Macronix International Co. They plan to discuss their findings at the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineer's 2006 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco later this week. It's the kind of breakthrough that people look forward to in the IT industry, although end users will have to be patient before it finds its way into products. It could take several more years for the technology to be developed sufficiently for use in finished products. Still, phase-change memory appears promising. The chips would be a new type of non-volatile memory, which is memory that can hold its electrical charge -- and its data -- after devices are turned off. Flash is also non-volatile, but phase-change memory can hold its electrical charge better than flash and use it more efficiently, its backers say. Flash also faces a roadblock in the future. As engineers make chip circuits more tiny, the circuits leak more power and ultimately lose their ability to store data after being turned off. The size limit appears to be around 45nm, although it will still be years before the flash industry starts using such tiny production technologies. Phase-change memory can be scaled down to 22nm, or far smaller than flash memory, the researchers developing it say. It also appears able to be more durable than flash, whose memory cells start to break down after 100,000 rewrites. While its prospects appear bright, the technology faces several hurdles. New chip designs must be relatively easy to manufacture, and they need to be cost-effective enough to attract device makers. RambusÂ faced this issue when its chips failed to overtake DRAM as the main memory type for PCs several years ago, despite having the backing of Intel. The problem, some companies said, is that the chips was were too costly to produce -- although Rambus vehemently disagrees with this. IBM has posted photos of the phase-change devices here, and some animation clips here.
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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.